I.
It begins in a darkened room in the dojo, and with the shuffle of feet just outside the shoji door that woke Jin up, and with the curve of Mariya-sensei's sword glinting over his neck in the dim light.
It begins - perhaps - long before that night, when Jin's father first brings him to the dojo and turns his third son over to the sword master, to be trained in such a way as will benefit his clan. It begins with days spent wielding heavy wooden practice swords, and carrying buckets of sand to strengthen his spindly arms, and with the first time he held a katana in his hands and felt the shape and weight of the steel settle into his soul. It begins with the long hours of practice that enable Jin to go from sleeping to armed in a breath, to snatch the hilt of his family's sword from the scabbard beside his bed and thrust it through the soft, vulnerable meat of Mariya-sensei's belly without a thought.
It ends with Sensei bleeding out on his blankets, choking and gasping; with the scarlet on Jin's hands and face and blade; and with the blind and base instinct that prompts him to flee the dojo before dawn.
He knows that he will not be forgiven.
II.
At first, Jin tries to avoid drawing his sword. Every time he brings it out, he sees the blood and hears Mariya-sensei's last words. Every time he brings it out, a part of him feels like he ought to be plunging them into his own chest, as tradition and as honor require.
But Jin wants to live.
And he comes back in to his sword when he draws it, one hot afternoon, to defend himself against some bandit trying to rob him on the road. After this man, too, is dead at his feet, and Jin is alive, standing over him with sweat in his eyes and blood surging under his skin, alive and alive and alive - Jin realizes how dull the blade has become. He has been neglecting it.
At the next town, he buys polish and a cloth with the dead man's money. He sharpens the cutting edge with his whetstone, kept up until now in the pocket inside his tunic. Jin can see his face reflected in the metal and he decides: he will not surrender this. He and the blade are one. Jin has lived by the sword his whole life. He has passed the point where he could have bowed to tradition, bowed to honor, and ended his life in repentance. Sensei had tried to kill him. And Jin had done what Sensei had trained him to do.
Jin doesn't want to die for that.
Surely, if what the sword tells him is true, he thinks (he hopes) that there are greater things to die for. Somewhere out there.
Jin goes out after death.
III.
But dying is not as easy as Jin first thought.
After the bandit there is a gang. And after the gang there is a thief. And after the thief there is a man who sells children. And after the man there is…
Jin cannot allow himself to be killed. Pride demands – honor demands – the blade in his hand demands – that he be defeated. There is a difference between death and defeat, and Jin wants to find one before the other.
But defeat is elusive. The same hours of training that let Jin kill Mariya-sensei also protect him now, leading him to the light of the sun on his sword and the smell of blood. The color of it gleams over the blade, waking him up like nothing else does.
Reminding him of Mariya-sensei, clutching his own ancestral blade, bleeding out over the blanket of Jin's bed.
This living in search of death makes no sense, but Jin goes on. The daisho bump his hip as he walks, a reassuring presence; all that Jin has left of his once-certain way.
IV.
In between trying to find defeat, Jin is hungry.
Being a fugitive is surprisingly difficult. Usually Jin can scrape together a few golden mon off the men he kills, or off the people that he saves from them. But often those men are fugitives too, or the people are refugees or poorer than sin, and there is nothing of value to be had. His days come down to a dusty road, and an empty belly, with a town up ahead and the knowledge that after this is more dust and more road and more hunger and not much of anything else.
Jin's always been thin and lean, but he notices that he's really starting to loose weight when his chest is piled with heavy bricks one night in a jail somewhere near Edo. He's forgotten the name of the town; careless, perhaps, but this is the fourth round of pressing he's had tonight and before that there was some unpleasant business with a poker that still stings madly (so different from a sword bite, the blundering agony of a burn) so he thinks that he can forgive himself for the lapse.
The other man - Mugen - is cursing in the next cell over like nothing Jin's ever heard, even during his year on the road. It's impressive and a rather good distraction from the lack of air and Jin tunes in, tries to stop thinking about the smothering weight over his heart, tries to ignore the black that swarms across his field of vision.
He doesn't think he'll die here. He'll die with a sword in his hand; that's what all this means.
He hopes he won't die here.
V.
Coin tosses have nothing to do with honor, with life or with death.
Jin stays anyway, after the first fight and the second, watching Mugen's swagger and listening to Fuu's voice and feeling as though here were two others as out of the world as he is. They are nothing like him, and yet he recognizes them.
Jin stays anyway, because Fuu is just a small girl in a pink kimono, with fireworks and a tanto and a pushy, insistent voice; a girl who looks like life could bruise her with a missed meal but instead pulls something out of nothing, ties knots and throws dice and never, ever gives up.
Jin stays anyway, because it is one thing to seek death, and quite another to find it trailing behind another man like a shadow, whispering beneath his curses, singing when he draws that short sword of his. Jin stays because this man is like nothing he has ever seen before: honorless and mannerless and furiously alive. This man Mugen might finally defeat him.
Jin stays anyway, because what the three of them have is tenuous as a web, as undefined as the look in Mariya-sensei's eyes, and this is like freedom.
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