Title: And This is Fate
Series: Samurai Champloo
Challenge:Jin/Fuu/Mugen: the scent of sake/the taste of sorrow/the sight of the sky.
Summary: These are the bonds that are forged on Fate and impossible to break. This is after the end, and Destiny has not abandoned them.
Disclaimer: Dx Lack of ownage. Sadly. If I did own it, there would be so much OT3 smex it wouldn't even be funny.
Jin is a person with a memory that's so near perfect it's daunting. He can place a name with a face, a sound to a sight, and a scent to each and every person worth remembering.
It's only been days since he left the sides of Mugen and Fuu, and when he smells sake on the fingers of a clumsy brothel girl who wears a spring kimono embroidered with bright yellow sunflowers, he thinks that maybe fate is mocking him from wherever it is, exactly, that fate resides.
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It's been a slow progression of time, the blur of days and weeks into a heartbreakingly short span of four months, when Jin first spots Fuu out of the corner of his eye in the massive city of Kyoto while looking for a place to eat. She's taken up waitressing again, or so it seems.
Her dango tastes like sorrow, and he wonders why he's walked his path in solitude for so many years, but it isn't until now – in this small resturaunt with bad food and good company – that he feels he's been so alone.
They decide that it's inevitable, and they can even stand the thought of drifting with each other until they can shake their fate. It goes utterly unsaid (because neither will say it) that they've both got their eyes peeled for the man who always smells of sake and has tasted more sorrow than either of them will ever know.
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It's five months later, and they're not surprised, really (they've been expecting it all along) when they finally find their freezing, ill, miserable, and a little more than half drunk Mugen up near the very northern tip of mainland Japan (it appears no one has told the Ryuukyuu native that it gets cold up there). They take him in, and clean him up, and teach him that he means more to them than a grain of sand to the stars.
And this is how it begins again. They hide from the falling snow beneath the protection of winter barren trees, and the air smells of sake, not in a way terribly unpleasant to their noses. The grilled fish no longer tastes of sorrow, as they watch the cloud covered sky under the vigilant gaze of Destiny.
Fin.