Eighteen months ago.

The fire was dying.

Fuu tiptoed around the farthest edges of the campsite, too skittish to travel farther than the dim circle of flickering reddish shadow, piling every little stick and twig she stumbled across into her arms. There wasn't much. They'd already gathered it all earlier, and had long since burned it.

As she moved back to the coughing embers she had to work her way quietly between Jin's prone body and the gnarled stump he'd lain by. He gave a particularly restful sigh and she froze, sure for a moment that she'd awoken him, but he only shifted to his side.

Fuu breathed again and delivered her load of sticks.

The instant she dropped them on the pile, the last remaining glow dimmed and smoked. Now that didn't make any sense! Desperately she blew on the coals and fanned them, but they were clearly on their last breath. Her sticks hadn't done much besides cut them off from oxygen. She sat back on her haunches and puffed out her lip, dejected and defeated. She was the worst at tending fires.

. . .

Resting Refrain (Part I)

. . .

Jin shifted again and Fuu tore her eyes from the last of her warmth and light.

She had to stifle a giggle. Jin, the most stoic and reserved man she'd ever met, often looked like a child when he slept. He'd accidentally fallen asleep with those glasses on and they were all askew, his mouth hanging wide open, his hair frazzled. She really liked it actually. The idiot never talked about anything, so sometimes she worried he was a two-dimensional drawing of a person rather than an actual human. But when he slept he seemed a lot more open. More real. Like there was this extra hidden layer, and when he slept it showed through like a patch of bright paint under peeling eggshell wallpaper. Not for the first time, Fuu found herself wondering what demons haunted his past. A guy didn't just become as silent as Jin without good reason. What was he dreaming about? Something good? Something bad? Something in between?

...And then, every so often, he would give a light snore. It was too rich. She wished she could capture the moment and show it to him while he was awake. He just looked so... opposite of what he looked like when he was conscious.

Fuu tapped her cheek and contemplated the scene, until abruptly she stopped giggling. She suddenly knew what Jin would say if she were able to show this to him. He would keep that same flat expression and would go, "Hmm."

As soon as Fuu thought of that she had to clasp her hands over her mouth to keep from waking her two companions. She was too hilarious! If Mugen were awake she might have even shared the joke with him. She probably would have even gotten a laugh!

After she calmed down she remembered with a jolt that in a few minutes she'd be totally alone in the dark, cold night. The moon hadn't even made an appearance yet tonight, and not too far away in the woods she could hear all sorts of faceless animals rustling...

She gave the open-mouthed Jin another once-over. She could always wake him up to get the fire going again but... she didn't need them for everything! At that thought she groaned and dropped her head into her hands. Who was she kidding? Sure, she liked to think if she'd gone off on this journey alone then she'd still have made it just fine. Her two bodyguards were a luxury, not a necessity. Yet they'd hardly been travelling together two weeks and the very instant they'd abandoned her she'd been kidnapped and thrown in a brothel. So much for taking care of herself.

In the couple of nights since then as she waited for sleep to come, her mind sometimes would stray down a dark familiar corridor, where at the end lay all the "what ifs" of life, and she would open one of the doors and wonder where exactly she would be right now if Mugen and Jin weren't a part of this.

I'd be cold and blind every night, for starters, she thought, turning her attention back to the poor mistreated coals. She imagined them wheezing and saying, "Help me..."

This really stunk. She couldn't sleep and she didn't want to be left in the dark in the forest all alone.

Not that she was really alone.

Behind her was Jin, ahead was the dying fire, and beyond it was Mugen, sprawled out haphazardly across the forest floor, one arm strewn over peeking roots, his legs twisted in a bit of moss. His geta had both fallen off. It was so dark she could barely make out his sleeping figure and might not have seen him if she hadn't already known he was there. But the rise and fall of his chest gave him away, the crest of his jaw rimmed in bare-bones red light as sleep and breath moved him.

Mugen.. now, Mugen looked exactly the same as he slept as he did when he was awake. There wasn't any paint or wallpaper, any layers, any hidden truths. There was just Mugen.

Fuu sighed and poked at the last chunk of coal with a partially chatted stick. It crackled and fell to pieces.

Well, that was that, then.

That last bit of light seemed like a beacon once it actually went out and she was plunged into darkness. It wasn't total darkness—it was a different kind, marked by deepest shadows fringed in the silver-gray of starlight sifted down through thin branches. It wasn't an ominous darkness, but with the hushed chorus of animals foraging or hunting or breezes through leaves, she felt the forest was pressing in around her.

Feeling her way on all fours she crawled back to the spot she'd made in a deep natural nook between fat emerging tree roots. From here she had something solid against her back and she could survey a wide semi-circle in every direction, encompassing their campsite and beyond. To her right, Jin snored. A bright flash glanced off the rim of his glasses and drew her eye.

Feeling bad that she'd laughed at him earlier and worried he might break them in his sleep, Fuu crawled over and gently pulled pulled them from the sleeping samurai's ears. But what had that light been? She turned the glasses over and over in her hands back in her own spot, until suddenly—

There—again!

It took a couple minutes of experimentation to find the source of the reflection, to figure out the glass was catching the reflection of the moon. She had to bend over to catch a glimpse of it. It had just barely begun to emerge and was showing, bit by smallest bit, through the forest canopy to the shadowed bed below. The light roved slowly, like a polar form of shadow itself. She watched the patches move as sleep continued to evade her, gradually infiltrating their little camp. Bored, she turned the glasses over and over in her hands.

A big patch of light had finally intersected the outer edge of their circle. Now instead of red Mugen was outlined in silver. The patch overtook him, slowly, over the next hour, swallowing him whole.

It must have been long after midnight when Fuu left the dark of her own crevice, seeking the light on Mugen's side of the clearing. There was enough moonlit space now for her to stretch her legs out and sit back against the tree trunk. He looked a heckuva lot less menacing this way, bathed in softer light. But he still looked pretty much the same as he did in his waking hours. His limbs splayed with carelessness, laying with fearlessness, back slightly to the woods... You could slap pretty much any word that ended in "-lessness" onto Mugen. Without knowing why she wrinkled her nose at him.

God, was she bored.

Why couldn't she sleep?

She turned the glasses over again, angling the little refracted moonspots at Mugen, thinking about how he'd react if she woke him up by blinding him with Jin's glasses. Wait. Who was she kidding? She knew what he'd say. He'd give her that murderous, dangerous, wild-eyed look that she couldn't be scared of if she tried, and he would go, "Oi!"

A laugh busted out of her. She was on fire tonight! (Well, with the jokes, at least.) She was too funny for her own good. She wrinkled her nose at him again, this time with the tiniest mote of affection, and wiggled the patch of light across his eyelids.

He squeezed them shut and drew a sharp breath, which had Fuu dropping the glasses abruptly into the dirt. She actually woke him!

She braced for the "Oi!"

But it didn't come.

Instead he relaxed again, breathing deeply—until just as quickly his eyebrows creased once more, deep lines forming canyons around his eyes, his chest rising, one hand clenching into a loose fist.

The glasses lay forgotten where she had dropped them. She whispered. "Mugen?"

His breaths quickened further and he tossed his head to the side. No, he wasn't awake. The realization struck her all at once and she felt silly for having sat there so startled for a moment, thinking maybe he was dying or something. But it wasn't her fault; after all, she'd never seen him make that kind of troubled expression. Never. Not even when execution had faced him that day after he strolled into her teahouse. So it took her a moment to recognize the emotion she saw playing his face like a shamisen.

Her bodyguard moved, clothes scratching against dirt and dried leaves. His mouth fell open and he panted, desperately, like he'd been running for hours without water.

The emotion was fear. Mugen was having a nightmare.

Fuu sat there like an idiot, staring. Should she wake him? Somehow she didn't see that going over well. But guilt and worry were beginning to creep up into her heart, as if Mugen was facing an unknown enemy somewhere in the night and it was all her fault.

"Hey, Mugen," she said gently, hoping to stir him and also hoping not to.

He was untouched by her voice. His breath had quickened to near-hyperventilation and his bared teeth were stark in the glowing moonlight. She moved herself quietly around to the other side of the trunk as he wildly tossed in his sleep and nearly hit her with a roving arm. Now she was on the side facing the dimly lit forest. She opened her mouth to speak his name again but stopped. It felt like intruding. Like she'd walked in on something very personal. And maybe she was a horrible person for thinking it, but... she wondered if an occasional dose of fear was healthy for someone like Mugen.

She scooted as close to his back as she could and peeked at his face. It was disquieting. What was he dreaming about? What could possibly quicken the heartbeat of someone like him? She'd thought until now that he wasn't even capable of experiencing fear. Maybe she was a horrible person after all—but only for thinking anyone could live totally without fear.

Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and she made up her mind. She reached toward him.

When she was a little girl her mother had always woken her from tossing nightmares with a gentle touch on the head, a brush of her hair. Mugen's shock of hair was tangled, yet surprisingly soft. She'd never touched it and was taken aback. "Mugen," she whispered, again.

He shot upward, panting for breath, sending her tumbling backward to the side of the trunk. She hit her head on a thick knot in the wood and the multitude of stars in the sky danced a dizzying jig for a couple moments. When she sat up she was about to give him a piece of her mind, but—

Mugen was just sitting there. He hadn't even noticed Fuu, off to the side as she was, slightly behind him. His breaths were gradually coming under control. As he fell back into silence he bowed his head, the lattice of moonlight shifting over his face like a fishnet, and turned his palms toward his face. Then, briefly, he brought his left hand to his other wrist and gripped it like it was broken, brushing his thumb across the inner side of it as if the veins there were painted on and he wanted to wipe them away.

What was he...?

Fuu let out the breath she'd been holding and his eyes flicked in her direction.

"Oi." (There it was.) But she didn't laugh. "The fuck did you wake me up for?"

Hey, so apparently he had known she was there by get tree trunk. Nothing slipped past him. "I, uh..." He was giving her those 'I'm gonna actually murder you' eyes. She sighed. The man could be such a big baby. "Couldn't get the fire started," she finished meekly.

To her surprise, Mugen's expression slid away from hard intimidation. He rolled his eyes back and looked at the moon as if to ask, "What did I do to deserve this?"

Fuu scrambled after him as he wobbled sleepily toward the charred pit where the fire had been. "You moron," he accused, and rubbed one eye. "You just threw a bunch of fat sticks on here."

"Yeah, to—" she shot back, but returned to a whisper as Jin rustled in his sleep, "—burn them!"

"Can't start with fatass sticks," he murmured. Then he mumbled incoherently and stabbed at the coals with his eyes closed, until...

"Hey!" Fuu whispered indignantly. The coals had sparked to life! All he did was smash them to pieces. Well, Fuu could have done that herself! "How did you.."

"Start off with kindling," he grumbled, and began to throw piles of dried pine needles onto the freshly glowing coals, "or you ain't getting' shit for your efforts."

"Kindling..." she repeated. "Got it."

"And when you put the sticks on," he went on, finally opening his eyes as he began to poke around in the pit for all Fuu's unburned sticks, "start small. And you can't just throw 'em on, either," he added. Fuu watched as he arranged the littlest sticks into a little tent around the sparking coal, leaning them against one another for support. Fuu realized something with a start, as the red of the bug-sized flames swallowing the dead pine needles sent light licking across Mugen's hands while he worked.

Oh, she thought. His tattoos.

The bracelets of blue around his wrists... They were such a part of him that she sometimes forgot they were there. What they represented. She thought of him running one thumb over them as the troubled hands of sleep retreated from his shoulders and frowned.

"You gotta let 'em breathe, or they won't catch fire." Fuu tore her eyes from his wrists and realized he was again glaring at her. There was no malice in it though, only sleepiness.

"Let them breathe," she repeated. "Got it."

"Think you can go without waking me up next time?" he growled.

Fuu nodded, for once without biting back at his aggressive tone.

Let them breathe, she repeated to herself as Mugen went back to his patch of moonlight. The fire was now crackling to life, hot flames eating their way up the diagonal sticks. A solitary spark detached itself and floated towards the cold sand. Fuu patted it out. She pulled more sticks from the dark side of the firepit, slightly bigger this time, and proceeded to stack them against each other like Mugen had shown her. Build them up and let them breathe.