a/n: Somehow, I felt like I could've done something better with this piece of inspiration, but this was as good as it seemed to come out... It's my first shot at writing Samurai Champloo (although I've loved the series for a while now) and I hope everyone will enjoy it. Reviews are always appreciated.
Oh, yeah, I don't own Samurai Champloo. :)
He walks along, down the dry dirt road.
This seems like it'd be a shitty place to live.
He's not quite paying attention, he's scanning the setting sun over the mountains in the distance and wondering if there's a place in this dust-covered, poor-looking town where he can find decent food for the few coins he has in his pocket. Scratch the decent – where he can find food, period.
A tiny kid wobbles by and nearly trips him.. He gives the too-skinny child a glare.
"Watch where you're going, brat," he mutters. The kid looks at him with wide eyes.
"Mugen?"
He looks up lazily, although something in his muscles tenses at the voice. It sounds kind of familiar.
At first, she doesn't look familiar but when he looks her in the face it's impossible not to recognize her – not to recognize her abnormally large, brown eyes.
"Fuu?" he says, unable to keep the surprise out of her name.
The child scrambles over to clutch onto Fuu's worn-looking kimono skirt, and gives a tentative glance in Mugen direction.
Mugen's jaw drops.
"You have a kid?"
Fuu suddenly looks uncomfortable. She blushes and fumbles for her child's hand. He notices, with a jolt, the size of her stomach. Even though the rest of her body is stick-thin, her stomach is wretchedly swollen. Fuu is pregnant. The same Fuu that he thought would still be a bright-eyed girl. The girl with too much attitude to get herself knocked up.
"As a matter of fact, yes," she says snappishly, "W-What are you doing here?"
"Traveling," he replies, not taking his eyes of off the little boy. It doesn't look much like her. Or at least that's what he decides.
Fuu looks down at her sandaled feet. "Oh."
The wind blows through the town and kicks up some dust. There's silence, but for the child's fidgeting.
"You look more stickish than usual," he tells her.
She just humphs under her breath, tightening her grip on the little hand.
"It's only been a few years. You must've been busy, popping out a kid."
Her brown eyes take on a ferocious edge and she glares at him.
"Shut up."
"You're married?"
She shrugs, not wanting to speak. But she explains, anyway.
"Yeah, I guess. It wasn't great."
Mugen reaches for his sword and shifts it nervously. "Wasn't?"
"He ran out on me."
He kind of wants to kill the bastard.
"Fun. Well, I'd better get going." He puts his arms behind his head, a gesture that screams I couldn't care less although he couldn't care more. He briefly wonders if she loved her husband.
"Mugen?"
He turns, not daring to hope, but there she is. And despite how desperately unhealthy she looks, despite the way she's aged in the past three years, he sees the Fuu that he always knew. He sees care in her eyes.
"Do you need a place to stay the night?"
So he stays. He stays, and they eat dinner. The kid is already dead asleep, so it's just the two of them and a heavy silence. When she's finished, she puts down her chopsticks with a force that makes her whole rickety table shake. She goes to bed without saying a word to him, and he wishes that it would've been more like old times – but she's feeling self-concious and defensive, and he's confused for once, stunned into silence… he's feeling something else he can't quite name.
He sleeps on the floor, at the other side of the room, and his stomach feels sick. He stares at her back in the dark and wonders about her husband.
Was he like Jin? Was he a little bit like him? Was he nothing like either of them?
Was she lonely? Did she long for some kind of protection?
Did she love him? Did she love him for a time, before realizing that it wasn't how she really felt?
Did she...?
The next day, at dawn, he awakens. He never was one for waking up early, but he itches to leave.
She look at him, half-asleep, from her pallet. He leaves.
He's only a couple steps out the door when he feels her hand around his wrist.
"I'm sorry!" she suddenly bursts out, and she begins to sob like a baby. Like Fuu that he knows. So he smirks, and for a second everything feels all right again. But then he feels something not-good in his throat.
He leans down so that their noses are touching
"I'll be back for you, girlie. Sometime." His voice is gruff, unwilling, but the fact that he's said it is enough.
She sniffs and the tears clear up a little.
He wonders if he'll really come back for her, if he'll decide she's too much of a bother. Or if he'll decide he doesn't want her anymore; that she's too much of a liability. He thinks he won't come back, but not because she's a liability. She's not.
But the way she makes him feel is addictive, almost like a drug. Because no matter what she's done, not matter how he tries to forget, he needs her.
So, in the end, he knows. He'll be back.
a/n: (weeps) Eeek! I am very dissatisfied with this. D: It feels too OOC. But ah well- I'm posting it anyway.