A/N: Hey guys! Sorry for the long wait. And it's not going to get shorter from here on, sadly.

Next installment of your favorite (or most hated, as the case may be) swordsman of the League.

Special thanks to my betareader, Alsodef. :D

The touch of a cool breeze on his forehead, the moist blot along the length of his sleeve, the faint tint of red along the corner of his eye felt all too real, but none as convincing as the form lying slumped on the ground a few feet behind him.

He turned, his eyes watching steadily, waiting with baited breath for the slightest hint of movement. His mind raced and time slowed. He realized how he felt torn on the inside by two opposing desires. He wished for the other man to move, but he also wished for their fight to stop. As his heart beat ever harder in his chest he realized that he had been caught in an inextricable trap. Still, he chose to wait.

While only seconds had passed, he felt as if he had stood there for eons watching at the same spot like a statue forced to look wherever the sculptor willed until the object of his interest finally collapsed on the ground with a thud and a clang.

"Taro!" he screamed, running to the side of the fallen man.

He was frantic. With obscured vision, constricted breath and scattered thoughts he turned his brother over and pulled him onto his lap. His racing heart had started to throb painfully as he looked upon the peaceful expression the brother had on his face and it had finally dawned on him that one of his wishes had at last come true.

"I have failed, Jiro," his brother said to him amid painful croaks that emitted blood.

"No, no, no! Please don't say that, please! It doesn't have to end this way!"

His hands had started to shiver and the shade of red in his eyes had started to get washed away by the tears that had started to flow down his cheeks. Quickly he tore off both his sleeves and bound the cloth along the bleeding wounds on his brother's body – the wounds that he himself had inflicted moments ago. There was still hope, he said to himself. It was still possible to save his brother

"My time has come," his brother said while raising a feeble hand to wipe the tears on Jiro's face. "I have no regrets, save one."

"Don't talk like that! It's not over!" he protested, feeling the cold hands of fate wresting all hope from him.

"I only regret that I was not a better brother to you," Taro said.

"No, no, no!" he argued, his voice bordering on screams.

Drawing in a deep breath Taro continued, "I failed to teach you the value of humility and my punishment for this failure is to die by your hand."

At this point no shred of hope remained and while his heart wanted to fight against the unfaltering grasp of death, his mind knew that Taro was only a few breaths away from the blissful sleep of eternity. In the very next instant, Taro's hand fell abruptly from his brother's cheek and onto to ground.

At that moment, Jiro knew that his brother was no more and still he cried out in despair, "Taro, no! No!" He shook his brother to no avail lamenting all the while, wondering why it had come down to this.

The loudness of Jiro's voice caused his body to tremble and his soul to be shaken from its place. It was a scream that could be heard across time and one that Jiro heard in his dreams, so much so that he often awoke to the sound of his own voice sorrowfully calling for his brother lost on that fateful day.

This day was no different. The name of his brother lingered on his lips and he could see his brother's lifeless body lying in his lap until he heard a whipping sound and his cheek stung from what was most likely a slap.

"What're you going on about?" came a question in a crusty voice.

Only when he had heard the question did it occur to him that the fight and his brother were part of a dream, the same dream that he had dreamt countless times since that ominous day. The image of his brother's body had begun to dissolve and he wondered about how long it had truly been since he had laid his brother to rest. He tried to recollect what had passed in the more immediate past that led to the current situation, but nothing came to mind.

"You awake or not?" came the voice again, followed by a slap to the other cheek. As the dream faded, he was finally able to open his eyes and he saw the silhouette of a pudgy man clad in armor standing in front of him. Still only barely conscious he was slow to respond which, in turn, earned him another slap.

Each slap felt harder than the last but it served to awaken him more fully. Once the pain from being slapped had subsided he looked around more carefully. He noticed a fire burning behind his interrogator and the shadows of two more men sitting with their backs turned to him.

Soon after, he was slapped a fourth time without provocation and he felt the weight of the steel gauntlets the pudgy man had been wearing. He tried to retaliate, to show the sack of lard standing before him what it feels like to be hit in the face with an armored hand, only to notice that his hands had been bound behind him and around the trunk of a tree.

"Not so tough now, are you, mighty Yasuo?" the man mocked.

"Leave him alone, Zhu," said one among the two men sitting by the fire.

"But, this is fun," Zhu said, "You should try it!" Zhu waited a while for his comrades to speak up but neither of them did. His shoulders slumped and he expelled a huff of bad breath in Yasuo's general direction as a result of being let down. A few more minutes he spent undecided about whether he wanted to torment his tied up prey before leaving to join his friends.

Yasuo had his eyes fixed on the ground as he tried to come up with a way to break free, taking a moment to understand his situation. He relaxed and leaned back into the tree, feeling the tough bark on his bare skin. Pushing his arms inward he could feel his palms moving close enough for him to clasp hands. Feeling around his wrists as best as possible, he could tell that his hands had been tied with a piece of rope and therein he saw a way out of his predicament.

"The two of you are boring, especially you, Ken," Yasuo overheard Zhu complaining in the distance. It was difficult to not hear the fat man and his voice like a knife on glass.

"Come on, Zhu, leave him alone, Can't you see he's feeling under the weather?" said another one.

"But that's the point, Anil! How can anyone feel under the weather when we've achieved such a great victory today?" Zhu chirped with a mixture of anger and excitement coloring his voice. "We have the Yasuo defeated and tied up like the rat that he is. In fact, I'd be itching to teach that filth the true meaning of consequences!" Yasuo, still overhearing the conversation involuntarily, found himself trying harder to untie his hands before those men could take advantage of his incapacitated state.

"Not everyone thinks like you do, Zhu," said the other man, Anil. "Not everybody wants to torture prisoners, not even Yasuo."

"For someone like you, yeah," Zhu began, "I can understand you not wanting to beat up captives. But what reason does he have? Have you ever thought about it?"

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't heard, have you? Ken is from Yasuo's native village." Zhu declared.

Yasuo froze when those words had registered correctly in his mind. A man from Fuuzato was sitting a few feet from him. He looked up almost immediately, wishing more than anything at that moment to be able to see a fellow from his home. A mix of both complementary and conflicting emotions had started to surface in Yasuo. Before him was one among the people he had considered his own, one among the people that blamed him, one among those he considered friends, one among those only too eager to execute him for a crime he had not committed. There was joy and yet there was anger, kinship and also alienation. On the whole, Yasuo definitely wanted to know who this man was.

"He's a sympathizer, Anil, and that's why he was so upset about being assigned guard duty," Zhu said, slightly annoyed.

The words rang once again in Yasuo's ears. He felt a glimmer of hope rekindled in his otherwise cynical self. It was a feeling he never thought he would feel after his escape from Fuuzato, more so after the death his brother - the last of those who ever truly loved him.

"Is it true, Ken?" asked Anil.

Yasuo's eyes were transfixed at the men sitting right ahead. The pudgy man was in full view on the other side of the fire, his accusing eyes staring down at the man on his right. Yasuo peered through the darkness trying to observe the features of this supposed sympathizer. The only thing he could see was the man's long hair neatly tied in a manner typical of the students of his school and his hope swelled.

"Ken, please, answer me. Is it true? Do you support him?" Anil asked somewhat nervously.

For several seconds the two men and Yasuo kept looking in Ken's direction. The pudgy man was annoyed, yet curious. The other soldier, Anil, seemed to be concerned and Yasuo hung in the moment as if the words Ken would utter next, if he would at all bother to respond to his friends' questions and accusations, held the power to change his life. The fire crackled softly. The chirping of birds had started. Dawn was fast approaching and Yasuo sat hoping against hope for a brand new start where he would no longer be alone against the world.

"If you weren't my friends," said Ken in a whisper barely audible to any who weren't paying close attention. "If you weren't my friends, I'd have picked up my sword against you."

"There, you see? I told you he was a sympathizer!" Zhu bellowed.

The mood of the situation had quickly turned sour and Ken stood up almost immediately. It seemed as if a fight was to break out between friends.

"And why do you think I'm a traitor, Zhu?" Ken yelled back. "I'll tell you why. It's because I'm from Fuuzato. If I had been from anywhere but Fuuzato, would you have doubted my intentions? Would you?!"

The tension had risen and both Zhu and Ken had drawn their blades, ready for a fight. Things would have gone much further if it wasn't for the peacemaker among them, Anil, who had jumped right in between them, pushing them away from each other.

"Please! Let's all calm down!" Anil interjected. "Ken, listen to me. No one is accusing you of anything. We just want to know if you…know Yasuo from before…and if you have any reason to believe he was right to do what he did."

The chirping of birds had started to grow louder. The sky was no longer pitch black. The fire had grown small, showing signs that it would die out in a few minutes and all the while the soldiers stared at each other, paying no mind to the prisoner tied up behind them.

Eventually, Anil gestured Ken to sit. Zhu seemed less excitable than before and also took a seat. Anil placed himself between his other friends, perhaps to prevent any altercations that might arise in future and Yasuo continued to watch from the distance.

Ken resumed his place in front of the fire, his back turned away from his fellow villager. For a long time nothing was spoken between the men, until Ken finally picked up a piece of wood lying nearby and started to scrape it with a small knife.

"I once knew a man," said Ken, "who came all the way from the south of the country." His eyes were still fixed on the piece of wood as he scraped away at it without effort. "He was a trader and his specialty was wooden carvings."

The sound of the knife scratching wood was continuous, but there was a rhythm to it and Ken continued to narrate in his trance-like state.

"I still remember that afternoon when I first met him. I was about seven at the time. It was my first year at the school and while my class sat as one of the older students demonstrated sword stances before us, I noticed this man under a tree, just watching. When the lesson was done, I ran to the man and asked him why he was staring at us and he said to me…He said that he wanted to make carvings of swordsmen from the school."

"At first, I thought he was mad. But then he kept coming every day. Then, one day I went out and asked him why he wanted to make carvings of swordsmen. And he recounted to me an incident from many years ago. He told me that a swordsman from my school had once saved him from a gang of bandits on the road, without waiting for so much as a 'thank you' in return for his kindness."

"I asked him how he knew that the man was from my school and he said that it was because of the kind of strikes he used. He said that the technique was exactly like the students practiced every day in my village. He said he had never seen that man again but the man's figure was indelibly etched in his mind. He had started making carvings of the man and, coincidentally, they sold for a lot more than his other goods. The swordsman had saved his life and his trade, he said.

"When I saw the trader for the last time, he gave me one of those carvings he'd made as a token of his gratitude to all those noble men and women who had saved so many with their blades. That was when I realized how much we meant to the people of Ionia. Every single one of us in the school was a beacon of hope, and we were looked up to. The greatest among us were all the more valuable and Yasuo was the very best of them all. Yasuo was the idol of every child in the school. We all dreamed that may be one day we would be able to do what he did. We admired him, all of us."

"I can never forget that day when we found Yasuo standing over the corpse of that elder, his sword and clothes covered in blood. We were shocked to see that he'd committed the greatest crime as a pupil of the school - the crime of treason. But that was not the end of it. When the others tried to take him into custody for his summary execution, he cut them all down and fled. In his wake was left a trail of corpses, one of which was the ruined legacy of my school and my village."

"After the war, we tried our best to rebuild the village and bring it back to its former glory, but we couldn't. Yasuo's taint was too strong and we simply could not erase it. No merchants would trade with us, no one would employ the students from my school. We lost everything. In a matter of years almost everyone had left the village in search of a decent life and eventually, the village itself was all but abandoned."

"So," Ken said, at last looking up from the piece of wood in his palm, "Does that answer your question, Anil?"

Both Anil and Zhu were speechless. They had not expected to hear all that Ken had told them. Yasuo too was pained to hear of all that Ken had narrated. Although, in the past few years, he had not encountered fellow students honor bound to slay him while he was on the run, he had never thought that it would be because the school or even his village had ceased to exist.

All his hopes had been crushed yet again and Yasuo sat there leaning against the tree he was bound to, wondering why he had resisted arrest and escaped his execution. Every decision he had ever taken, every step of the way, it seemed, served only to worsen the mistakes he had set out to fix in the first place. How could one simple act born of indiscipline have brought down the whole world around him? And, how was it that nothing he had ever done could make things better?

Meanwhile, the conversation among the soldiers continued.

"I'm sorry, Ken" said Zhu sincerely. "I didn't realize…"

"Spare me," Ken spat out somewhat angrily. "Fuuzato was lost, but its people still thrive and we are honorable and proud. We don't need your pity."

From the distance, Yasuo couldn't help but remember the motto of the school, and by extension, of the village itself. "Honor in being, pride in doing," he said aloud.

The guards, though confused at first, understood soon enough that it had to have been Yasuo who had spoken. Zhu and Anil looked at Yasuo almost immediately, but Ken was slow to face him. It was clear that he was reluctant.

"Ironic that you should be the one to say it," said Ken after a brief silence. The words could not have come out any more bitterly than that and Yasuo felt the sting of guilt once again.

"Ironic? Hmm, I suppose I can understand why you think so, but I disagree," he replied. As intended, Yasuo had managed to annoy Ken, or so it appeared from the grimace that had taken form on Ken's face.

"You would disagree wouldn't you? That's all you've ever done. You disagreed with the teachings of the school. You disagreed with what was expected of you as guard to the elder. You disagreed with your sentencing. The list goes on…" said Ken dryly.

"It does, doesn't it?" said Yasuo condescendingly. "But you know the most interesting thing I disagree with?"

Ken refrained from replying, seeing Yasuo's question as a petty attempt to annoy him further.

"Come on, guess!" Yasuo egged him on.

Ken was mum.

"No? You don't want to guess?" Yasuo said playfully, "All right, I'll give you a hint. It has something to do with being tied to this tree."

Zhu and Anil had grown anxious by this point. "Do you think he's lying?" they whispered among themselves.

"Of course, he's lying about it. How can you even doubt that?!" Ken murmured back, although it was loud enough for Yasuo to hear.

"You aren't scared to come take a look, are you?" Yasuo said rather provocatively.

Ken cursed his breath and prepared to go check on Yasuo. Anil and Zhu merely exchanged glances, wondering if it was a good idea to let Ken do the checking, considering he was deeply upset about what had happened so many years ago.

The annoyance of having to guard Yasuo, of having to explain his position on Yasuo to some of his closest friends and finally having to put up with Yasuo's irreverence was beginning to wear on Ken. But Ken was not the complacent sort. He lay a hand on the hilt of his weapon in case of any eventualities, although it did not seem like the need would arise.

As he approached Yasuo, he beheld the man staring at the ground in front and his face was devoid of any of the mischievousness he had exhibited only moments ago. Ken wondered why there was such an obvious mismatch in voice and expression, but he decided not to waste too much doing anything other than what he had set out to do. In his haste, Ken walked past Yasuo thinking that it would be better to stay focused on the goal never realizing that doing so could prove to be a mistake.

The instant Ken decided to turn around to face the back of the tree, he could feel his feet being pulled back.

A/N: Just to clarify, the name of the village and the brothers is my creation.

Fuuzato (combination of the Japanese readings of the characters for Wind, read as Fuu, and Village, read as Sato) is literally "wind village" or "village of wind".

Taro and Jiro are the names given to the first born and second born sons, respectively, in Japanese culture. Those are not the only names they use, obviously, but I thought they served the purpose well enough.

Any feedback/critique is welcome.

Thanks for reading and hope you like it.