Tumblr word prompt by ba-sing-saying. In which wee Tsu meets Black Star for the first time.
trust: belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective, etc.
She stares at the lanky boy chopping potatoes, then shifts her gaze to Kid, who only shrugs. "You haven't met him yet," Kid offers.
"He has blue hair," she murmurs.
"Your tattoos move. Is blue hair that odd?"
Tsubaki laughs, and then shifts a little to better admire the astonishing skill and rapidity with which the boy is using his potato knife. "No, I didn't mean it that way. It's only that it sort of reminds me of something…"
"Perhaps you knew him. He's from Japan as well." Kid says it casually, but Tsubaki can't contain her lovelorn gasp at the sound of her homeland. Half a year away from it and it's already achy and tingly, a phantom limb pain that never leaves her.
"Oh," she breathes. Kid smiles faintly and pats her on the shoulder with the typical, if sympathetic, incomprehension all these strange circus people share when she talks about the place she came from. They all have itchy feet and wandering hearts, but her feet turn themselves east of their own accord and her heart didn't cross the oceans with her. It stayed among the sweetly whispering pine trees she'd walked beneath for all her thirteen years, all by itself, and no matter how she tried to bait it to return, it refused steadfastly.
Not my home any more, she tells herself yet again, even as the strange blue-haired boy begins to— unbelievably— achieve even greater speed in his chopping. Bits of potato fly everywhere, and when he spits a devastating curse in Japanese, she can't contain her giggle.
He spins to face her, eyebrows shooting up. He's somewhere around her age, she sees, a few inches shorter with baby fat still padding his cheeks, but he's got a stretched quality to his limbs that might indicate a future growth spurt.
"Hello," she says, smiling. "You're very handy with a blade."
He just goggles at her wordlessly. "Hello," he says finally, still in Japanese, after an audible swallow. "Neat tattoos."
"Thank you. I'm Tsubaki." Unsaid and sour on her tongue is Nakatsukasa, but for now, her brother's deeds are still infamous in the place this boy hails from, and she doesn't much feel like talking about it. She doesn't feel like thinkingabout it, but her brain's as rebellious and cruel as her absent heart.
"Black Star," he says amiably, and she stops breathing.
"Star Clan," she hisses, and her hands are uncomfortably empty in the face of a living monster.
Except— the monster looks hurt, mutinous, snarly all at once, and she's reminded of a kicked puppy. "So? Not my fault, is it? I was a baby, I don't remember a damn thing!"
She runs the math quickly in her head, and yes, he's not lying. He would have been very young indeed when the Star Clan massacre turned an entire city scarlet. Still, though. He's got a knife in his hand and he's already proven to be handy with it, and she doesn't at all trust someone with such a bloodline to be anywhere near sane, so she only forces her face into a semblance of a smile and nods. He just keeps staring as she edges out of the mess tent, and she notices that his eyes are as green as pine needles.
A month later, he corners her while she's mucking out the horse's train car, flailing a little. "I'm not like the rest of my family! All right?"
Tsubaki grips her pitchfork tighter and pins her eyes somewhere over his shoulder. "Of course not."
It's a blatant lie and the sudden slitting of his eyes proves that he knows it. "Nakatsukasa," he whispers, and she grits her teeth.
"Who told you that?"
He shrugs. "I can read, you know." She barely holds in her disbelieving snort. "I get papers from home whenever I can. I know what your brother did."
"Be quiet!"
Black Star is relentless, taking another step closer. "How can you judge me when your family's evil too?"
"Not my family," she chokes out, winding her fingers in her ponytail and pulling, desperate for an anchor. "Just one!"
He sighs, and it's not a rambunctious boy's sigh but an old, exhausted, somber one. "Yes. Still. You're one of us now, you're with the circus, and you should trust us."
She pulls her hands away from her tangled hair, gritting her teeth, and stares him down. "Said the fox to the hare," she told him, in their native tongue, and his lips thinned almost viciously before he turned and stomped away.
For such a habitually energetic boy, Black Star is capable of being very focused, and it startles her. She pauses, gentling Kiku with a firm word and a hand on his golden withers, and stares through the branches in something like a trance.
Black Star stills, squints, then explodes into a flurry of flips, landing easily on his feet and doing another celebratory cartwheel when he sees that all four of his knives are squarely in the center of the target painted roughly onto the tree.
"You can come watch me work my magic if you want," he calls loudly, and she flushes.
"No, thank you," she answers uncomfortably, clucking to Kiku and tugging the reins.
"Don't go. You'll be missing out. I'm really damn good!" he shouts.
Her feet stop, almost against her will. "You throw knives," she says, more to fill the silence than anything.
He nods, a little sweaty with a leaf stuck in his outrageous hair, grinning like a fool at her, apparently thrilled that they're finally having something approaching a civil conversation. "You and I should spar some time. I've seen you polishing your sword. It's a nice one." He sounds more enthusiastic than she's ever heard him, barring the one time Mira somehow procured mass amounts of chocolate.
Taken aback, she mumbles out a vague agreement, and then somehow he's hustled her back to the stables, untacked Kiku, and put him away. In less then ten minutes they're circling across from each other with sharp objects in their hands.
He lunges, and he's not bad, but she twirls out of the way easily enough and sends him sprawling with a lightly extended ankle.
"You are good. Like I thought," he says, sounding unaccountably pleased even with dirt all over his nose, and then he springs at her with such skill that she only just holds him off. Maybe this is all his cursed blood gave him, she thinks, astonished. They lock blades after a moment and she gapes at him, panting open-mouthed.
He's still grinning from ear to ear. She thinks about her own bad blood, about her heart, still riding reluctant shotgun in her traitor brother's pocket an ocean away, and she lets her arms wobble, just slightly.
He doesn't take the opening. There are no witnesses, and her vitals were cleanly exposed. This odd, wild boy could kill her with a single deft twist of his lightning-quick blade, but he doesn't.
Instead he stabs his sword into the dirt and links his hands behind his head, watching her cannily, green eyes very sharp, at odds with his fool's smile. "Trust me yet?"
He's worked so hard to make her feel at home here, among these strange people in this unfamiliar land, in spite of all her hypocritical suspicions. She smiles back helplessly and lets her blade drop too. "Perhaps."
"We should do this again! Practice makes perfect even more perfect, you know?"
He bounces around her like a squirrel and she starts to laugh. "All right." There's a very strange feeling in her chest as she watches him catapult off a tree trunk, and she thinks maybe her heart has decided it's too lonely wandering by itself, after all.