Title: A Week Spent with Basho
Author: Liriaen
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~1500
Summary: And once Fuu has found the samurai who smells like sunflowers... then what?
A/N: Written for Saint_Alecto for Yuletide 2009. Haiku are by Basho, 1644-1694; spot-on speed-beta lovingly provided by Vaysh11, Kennahijja, and Nemetean.
A Week Spent with Basho
The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water.
.
The chimes and charms on her mother's tanto jingle. Fuu turns the thrice-cursed thing in her hand and, for the last time, studies the symbol of that strange Kirishitan creed: a cross, hidden inside a skull.
To Fuu, they have become inseparable. You choose that tiny man on the cross, you choose death.
So she tosses the dagger out, tosses it out to sea as they are making the crossing back from Ikitsuki Island. She overreaches and, flailing, almost capsizes the boat. It's only after Mugen has blindly grabbed her calf and pulled her sorry ass back in that she slumps and starts to sob.
"Stupid broad," Mugen wheezes, holding his side where she must have kicked him.
Jin doesn't do anything. Jin only looks at her. Without his glasses, he looks like a mole. He's still running a fever and sits wrapped in a blanket, all sleepy-like, but she knows he is watching her.
"Why did you throw it out?" Jin asks. Fuu can barely hear him over the surf, his voice is that toneless.
Sullen now, she wraps her arms around her knees. "It's just a piece of old junk," she says. Her eyes travel across the water and back to the island.
Mugen hawks and spits, wheezing some more as he fights with the rudder. Jin closes his eyes and disappears under his blankets.
Now that it is gone, the loss of the dagger twinges. Fuu was accustomed to seeking and cupping it in her hand, was used to fingering the tiny chimes to make them sing. "I mean, what sort of god is that, anyway," she says to no-one, although she wants to ask Jin, "what god would ask his followers to die for him?" The gulls wheel and screech, and for a long time, that is the only answer she gets.
***
It is deep autumn
My neighbour
How does he live, I wonder.
.
They pass by the store where they bought the Castella, and Mugen could swear he's tasting it again. The thick crumbly sponge cake, rich with butter and egg and vanilla. He doesn't like Western things, normally, so the first few bites lay on his tongue like lumps of clay, then glued themselves to his palate, nearly making him gag.
"Hey," he says and nudges Fuu. "You still got some money on you, don'tcha. How about we get more of that yellow cake."
"What?" Fuu says, torn from her thoughts.
Jin only throws him a look. Jin, who had bravely munched his way through the sweetmeat, making appreciative little grunts. "Yes," Jin pronounces slowly. "Let's."
Who knows if they ever come to Nagasaki again.
***
From time to time
The clouds give rest
to the moon beholders.
.
Or, who knows if they'll ever leave.
Mugen sits out on the porch and stares at the night sky. There's a halo around the moon, so you can't see the stars. The cicadas sound fierce tonight; summer is waning and they have to hurry up. Find a mate, lay eggs, all that stuff.
Behind him, behind closed shoji, Jin isn't doing too well. Poor sod should have kicked the bucket on Ikitsuki, really, instead of having to malinger on.
Mugen digs a bare foot into the gravel - the good, unsplinted leg, that is. On Ikitsuki, he and Jin have mostly lain in a heap, cursing each other's elbows and ribs, too badly wounded to move, too sick with infection to care.
Inspired by what he thinks is a fond memory, Mugen gets up and stomps into the cheap room they share. "Right," he says, hands on his hips. "Just letting you know I'm not finished with you, dojo-boy. So don't think you can simply piss off like..."
Jin's face is papery under a week's worth of stubble, and his eyelids are blue.
"Like that."
Fuu's stare is like a slap, and Mugen falls silent. "Right," he repeats for good measure, then clunks back to the porch to resume his watch. It feels lonely, now that the moon is gone and the cicadas have stopped their song.
***
Along this road
Goes no-one;
This autumn evening.
.
Fuu wipes Jin's forehead and whispers, "He doesn't mean it."
Turning his face to nudge her hand, Jin smiles. It hurts the corners of his mouth. "Oh, he does," Jin says, surprised by how creaky he sounds. As if something within him were shifting. Bubbling with blood, perhaps.
He crooks a finger into a c'mere.
"About your father," he says. "The Sunflower Samurai."
"Huh." Fuu sits back on her heels. "I don't want to talk about him."
"Yes, you do."
Fuu bites her lip, shakes her head and turns her face toward the shoji. It's darker now that the moon is hiding, but he can still see her tears.
"What you said on the boat," he prompts, reedy but gentle.
"That he loved his stupid god better than mom and me?"
"That's not how he perceived it," Jin says. He moves a bit and breaks into a sweat because his midriff is on fire. "Kasumi-san left because he knew the bakufu would never leave him or the Kirishitans be. But he wanted his family to be safe." He has to pause there, and he can see it on her face, the almost-blurted, Oh yeah, and what would you know about it, since you're so intimate with the bakufu, o-ronin-san?
Oh, he remembers Mariya-dono, and Yukimaru-chan, and Kariya, the Hand of the Gods, so he smiles feebly and squeezes her hand and closes his eyes.
***
Moonlight slants through
The vast bamboo grove:
A cuckoo cries.
.
"It's unfair," Fuu says, folding up next to Mugen on the porch. "I find my father, and then this... this Kariya k-k-kills him. Not that he wouldn't have died anyway. And then he kills my family, too." She hiccups and wipes her nose on her kimono sleeve.
"Whut." Mugen peers at her. "What family?"
"You, and Jin," she sniffs.
"Whoa, wait," he says and wriggles his hands in the air. "I ain't dead yet." Then he grows serious. "You mean. Jin is-?"
She shakes her head. "No, no. He's sleeping." Her stomach growls. "You don't have any cake left, do you?"
"Huh." After a bit of rummaging, Mugen shoves a wax paper package at her, and between hiccups and sniffles, Fuu starts to chew. The first few bites stick in her mouth like sugared chunks of earth. "Why did he do that, Mugen? I mean, letting Kariya run him through," she says quietly. "When he knew it was suicide?"
"Some stupid samurai thing, I bet," Mugen says.
***
Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warrior dreams.
.
His ears are attuned to the night, and to any sound Jin might make.
Family, huh.
When Fuu turns in, he barely nods her good-night, pretending to tie his splint instead. Some stupid samurai thing, no doubt. That's what it always boils down to, with the bushido guys and their high-flyin' ideals.
Mugen now, he's more like a rabid dog, the fierce kind that latches onto a thigh and doesn't let go. You virtually have to club it to death before it opens its jaws.
Basically, he's everything Jin is not. Look at all the stuff Jin could learn from him. Inexplicably, that thought kind of brings him down.
If he could walk properly, he'd walk away now.
***
The fleas and lice-
and next to my pillow,
a pissing horse.
.
It's a few days later, and autumn is here for good. The gusts of wind are miserably cold, and people in the streets huddle against the eaves, eager to get back inside. With Mugen still clomping about, and Jin a world better but reduced to crawling on all fours, Fuu is temporarily back to running her errands without a bodyguard, but that's okay, really; she's good at that. And now that Kariya is dead, who would still go after her, anyway?
Perhaps she should mention that to them.
Right now, though, Fuu only looks back and forth between her yojimbos and gapes. She wishes she had her mom's tanto now, because it might be useful to have something to draw, even if it's only a puny woman's dagger, dangling netsuke - it would let them know she's serious.
Or just seriously confused. They're not fighting, are they.
"Guys," she says and drops her shopping, "guys, I'll... er. I'll just turn around and when I say now, you'll be decent again, yes?"
She turns and counts to ten, and at least Jin has the manners to pull up the covers, but Mugen still lies splayed on the futon and skritches his belly.
"I was only checking his bandages." He yawns.
Jin mutters something about how Mugen is hopeless, hopeless, yet he blinks like a mole who just happened to get some.
"I thought we were family," she says, disappointed.
Mugen stretches to work a kink out of his neck. "What makes you think we're not," he says and scoots over to make room for her.
Fuu looks at Jin, too thin and white where he isn't red and bandaged, and at Mugen, fresh pink scar tissue too bright and soft on tawny skin. But they are warm as they curl around her, keeping her snug in the middle.
Just as she is about to drift asleep, Mugen's chin pokes her breastbone.
"Hey, ssst," he whispers, so Jin doesn't hear. "You bring any Castella?"
.