Disclaimer: Not mine
A Spectrum of Gray
It is in the crux of spring when they first meet, and the frost on the water is as white as the sand. Suzu's master gives him his scarf that day not because of the chill, but because while Suzu is comely, he is dark. His skin is the color of strong tea; it catches people's eyes as he passes, and they linger upon his brow, the angle of his cheek, the line of his throat.
'Wear this' his master says, unwinding the cloth from about his neck. 'Keep it to your face.' Suzu receives it, feels the warmth still caught within its folds, and thinks absently how naked his master's throat seems without it. He does as he's told, but with curiosity. They are half a league before they enter Hagi, where they will meet the Choshu lords, where Yoshida-sensei will present himself as their resolute revolutionary and peerless captain and his page as -- Suzu's face burns dark as he hastens to wrap the white scarf about his swarthy skin. Of course, he realizes, of course. He has been a child, nothing but foolish. Why should the lords look favorably upon a boy whose face is darker than any native, the color of a foreigner, strange skin over gangly limbs, a desecration of Japanese raiment?
He's dirty, Suzu thinks, fingers weak despite his conviction. He's never given it thought. His brother hadn't been this color, his brother who had been both mother and father to him -- and Suzu realizes that he's never known his parents; their loss is one he's never felt. Images unbidden swarm through his head, dizzying: colors and shapes without form. He envisions their mother, lily white and sleek-haired, her flesh pawed and blacked by the broad, filthy hands of some dirt-colored foreigner. His brother had probably kept him out of pity, fed him and raised him because his brother had been a good man, honorable and dutiful and Japanese. Maybe this was the meaning of the expression Suzu had never recognized in his brother's eyes, that dampened determination that seemed almost like --
His master's hand gestures over his own, slides gentle against his knuckles and brushes his face, fingers pale and long and perfect. 'What is it, Suzu?' he asks, and his voice is grazing but uninflected. Suzu hadn't realized that he's almost in tears.
'Excuse me,' he says, not liking the vulnerable pitching in his voice, and he shuffles back a half-step so he can bow his head while pretending that he is no longer a child asking for comfort. 'Excuse me, Master, I've caused you difficulty. I hadn't realized that with my face --'
'Your face is acceptable,' his master interrupts. His hands reach out again, and Suzu can never be forced to realize how long his master's arms are, how flat and sturdy the curve at his wrist. 'You have the righteousness of the sonno joi set upon your brow. What they think when they watch you is not my concern --' he pulls the material from under Suzu's chin, spreads it over his shoulders like wings, smoothes the cloth over his cheek and the arch of Suzu's neck, palms warm and catching rough in the cloth, murmurs, '--rather, it is the who, that is.' The sincerity behind Yoshida-sensei's eyes is imprecise, but kind, and when he turns back towards the road, it is without a linger or a glance. Suzu waits a beat more before he follows, feet scuffling in the dust at his master's heels.
When they reach it, the townspeople do not stare less at the sheer black knife of a man and his silvered servant moving between them in the streets. The Choshu lords, gathered upon daises in piled colors and silks, look upon him pale but not unreproachful, even in the face of Yoshida-sensei's forbidding gaze.
What he knows is only what he observes --
(A black cat twines at his legs; his master's eyes are fixed elsewhere when he calmly commands Suzu to strike it with his heel. Suzu looks about him and gently disentangles the animal when his master turns his back, and a brightly clothed noble snaps his fan shut and smiles, his pet curling in his lap)
-- and Suzu does not understand it; the only effect the white scarf serves is to pull him further from within his master's shadow.