I own my OC and her sensei. That's all.

A fist connected with his face. He fell onto his back. Yet, he still kept his eyes shut as a scream echoed around him. "You cannot ask that!"

His nose hurt. His heart hurt worse. I promised myself I'd never let this happen again …

. . .

He was sneaking into the dojo. Unlike most parents, his father encouraged his sons to sneak. So, the ten-year-old was now proud of how he could sneak up on everyone, except Father … No one could sneak up on Father.

Of course, his father also said to respect their fellow students' privacy, but like most children he picked and chose which of his father's instructions to follow, when his father wasn't around. So, when he heard splashing in the otherwise empty dojo he knew that meant someone, likely a student, was washing some sweat off at the end of an unusually hot day of training alone. He kept sneaking up on them instead of announcing himself to see how well he could do so.

He was disappointed to see it was the older lady in her forties, who'd just started lessons in the beginner's class that year. She seemed rather boring to him, silent and sullen. And then he saw big, multi-colored bruises on her arms.

He made an audible gasp. Nothing during the training session should have done that! She turned on him.

"You! What are you doing here?!"

She grabbed him by the front of his uniform and pulled him closer to her. He shrank away, not because he wasn't trained enough to beat her in a fight between the two of them, but because you never hit an elder. So, he was effectively helpless here. Thus, he was ready to agree to whatever she demanded.

"Don't tell anyone what you've seen. You hear me?! Don't tell anyone!"

He didn't. How sorry he was he didn't after learning the woman had been shot to death by her husband. Apparently, she'd been using some of what Father taught her to stand up for herself in the privacy of the home she and her husband shared with no one else. Maybe she'd thought that would be enough to save her without shaming him, but it had not been … And his father felt guilty too, afterward, for not knowing, not helping somehow, perhaps, for only helping her stand up enough to anger her husband to the point of killing her.

He had held his son after their shared confession, an unusual thing since their family wasn't much for touching each other outside of training, and his father even less so than his mother. His father, his sensei, had said, "Let us both just learn from this my son and carry what we learn forward from here." He thought he'd learned at only ten years old to look out for continually covered arms, for those who seemed afraid to let theirs be seen bare, but apparently not …

Images shifted in his head, one after another, a tourist like him, but a woman a few years younger always in long-sleeve, thin shirts of dark color even on the hottest of days in cities where the sun reflected off metal and asphalt. An assassin coming to kill him in dark ninja attire including long sleeves and gloves covering the hands as well as her arms even as she left her face bare. A woman in sloppy, dark clothing that covered her hands and wrists. A woman in more soft, simple, non-eye-catching attire again, but always dark with long sleeves. And the ten-year-old's promise had not moved the twenty-something's mind or eyes all this time, for a stranger, for an acquaintance, for an enemy, for the one helping him raise his sons …

He sighed and sat up again. His eyes were still closed images of thick, long scars covering from collarbone to waist, from wrist inward, front and back, still emblazoned on his eyelids. He leaned forward before speaking gently. "Jona … tell me."

"No!"

He opened his eyes and looked up. As he'd heard, she was now wrapped in his robe back turned to him sitting sideways beside a space heater. Her arms were wrapping around her folded-in legs tightly. She now looked like a thick and dark-shelled egg sitting up on a table. He came up softly behind her, nose throbbing. Then he sat beside her. That meant he was farther from the heater on the other side of her, but ... "Jona?"

Her answer snapped out without further movement from her still body. "Leave me alone!"

"No. Talk to me, Mayu ..."

"What?" She turned to look at him finally, dark eyes wide.

He smiled sadly at her. "If you wish to separate your clan-life from your time with me, you need another name down here do you not? So, be truthful with me, Mayu. Be sincere, be blunt, as you usually are." There was laughter in his voice now and a warm smile under his swelling nose. Then it fell away. "Tell me what happened to you."

She turned away brows furrowed and looked in the direction of the heater. "No!"

He sighed and looked over his shoulder. His four turtle-sons were lying on their stomachs before the other space-heater in stacks of two that touched each other. They stared at him and "Mayu" with wide eyes. They seemed safe enough for now. He could keep half an eye watching them out of its corner, while both remained fully on her. "Mayu, speak to me."

"She used to call you, Splinter."

His brows flew up. "Splinter?"

"You were the splinter we could not get to, embedded in your clan, embedded in her mind. We could not reach you to destroy you! You were supposed to die, and we could not make it happen according to the stipulations of the contract! So, you were a disgrace to us!"

"To whom?"

"To the organization, me … and my sensei ..."

"Your sensei …" The tightness in her voice and drawing away and hardening of her form at the mention of her teacher caused him to wonder. A fear grew in his heart.

"Sensei" had always meant "father" to him, the annoying presence that never let him or Saki get away with anything, the person he dearly wanted to make proud of him, the person he wanted to be just like when he grew up, who was like a hero on a mountaintop watching over everyone, keeping him and all those dear to him safe. He was that hero in all the stories he was told of his family's recent history. A sensei should be all that. His sensei had always had been that for him.

Horror seemed to climb out of a deep hole and enter Yoshi's heart as he probed this woman's secrets further, "Did your sensei ..?"

"She hated you!" Mayu turned a sneer upon him now and pushed her face closer to his swelling one. He backed away a little. "She would have been glad you lost your wife and baby! She made it happen! So, don't tell 'me' you weren't just as weak before and hurt by her as me! Don't pretend I'm the weak one here!"

He pulled away further at her words and tone staring at her. "You're not."

"Oh! And you'll 'still' say that when you learn I've been with her since I was fourteen, that she held me less than a day's travel from my parent's home every time I wasn't on a mission, but I didn't see them for four years and only then from far away, that she beat me too sore to move without demanding it of me every time I tried to run away, that she could always get me back whenever she wanted to through all her connections, that I was so grateful when Saki killed her I'd do anything for him even as I watched him get as bad as her!"

Yoshi drew even farther away from Mayu as she continued, slowly rising till he was almost standing up, and till she, following him, was standing on her knees. He looked back down and spoke in a warm, calm voice. "Everything, but kill me, it seems …"

She looked up and blinked at him. He spoke again in an even gentler voice. "Everything, but make my sons orphans …" He gave her a soft smile.

She began to cry. She cried hard as a raging river. She sobbed till he thought the seams of scars holding most of her skin together would burst. He almost gaped. Her words had a like effect. "I'm sorry I hit you! I am still Rin, not Jona after all!"

He fell back to his knees and wrapped his arms around her. "No, you are Jona, aboveground, if you wish to be. But you are Mayu to me, always, fearless in your honesty. Don't cry …"

"But why do you call me that! I'm a liar! I was a liar, when I first met you!"

"Maybe, to survive, but the truth had to be drained out of you by punishment constantly it seems. Truth comes to you as naturally as beauty to a flower. It is part of your nature and has returned to you now. Don't hide it from me, little one." He found feelings welling up in him, like Miwa, and his sons, and even Tang Shen had called forth in him, a tenderness the more cocky, playful, little brother of his family had found surprising, when Tang Shen first let him hold her and keep her safe, and when she first let him do so for their Miwa …

He felt Mayu give a broken laugh. "Then I will call you 'Splinter,' because you never go away and are an annoying irritant under my skin making me worse than normal in the way of being blunt, when I'm down here with you!" And he laughed back. Then his brow furrowed above her head, where she could not see. He had never had a younger sister before, but if he had had one …

He gave Mayu another squeeze, like mother had in private, when he came to cry in her arms far away from where Father and Saki could see. Before, "Mayu" had been his enemy, in the deep recesses of his heart … Now, she was family, far more than Saki ...

"It's alright, Mayu. I've got you. Like one of us has one of our little turtles when they need us, I've got you now." The woman who'd hurt her was dead now, it seemed, and he would make sure no one ever hurt her again.

. . .

He looked down with wet eyes and a gentle smile. All four of his little turtles covered her sleeping form (wrapped in his robe) with their own sleeping forms. Thankfully they were lying before the two space heaters that continued to warm them all. He sighed throwing another robe over them. And to think he'd thought her bringing him three spare robes ridiculous. Then he lay down to the side of the pile of peace and curled around them all in a way that had been impossible before his mutation like a dog or cat might around a basket of their puppies or kittens. He was still smiling to himself. This was his family and he would protect it.

What do you think?

God Bless

ScribeofHeroes