Chapter 3 Afternoon of Day 1 after Death
The smell of soup brought her mostly back to wakefulness. The old retainer had returned with a small cook pot with soup, some crock ware and tea. Her bleary eyes watered at being opened when all she wanted to do was sleep for a week. But, her sense of duty called, and she knew she needed to get some soup into Mugen and Jin.
"Ah, Kato-san, I would love some tea before we try to feed the soup to the guys. I'm sure they would complain about their hunger if they were awake." And she smiled lovingly at the sleeping men. The tea was soothing and helped ease her pain a bit. He had found some medicinal tea.
The little old man was instrumental in holding up Jin's and Mugen's heads respectively as she carefully spooned the broth into their mouths. Fuu was finding it rather difficult to remain sitting as the pain in her stomach seemed to grow more annoying. The use of her stomach muscles couldn't be helped, but it still hurt.
After feeding her two 'babies' she and the retainer changed their bandages and applied an herbal poultice over the wounds to reduce the swelling and chance of infection. Thankfully, Mugen's lips no longer looked as blue, but his hands were still ice cold from the blood loss. Jin was in a little better shape, but he was also cold to the touch.
Touching their cold bodies reminded her of facing her mother's corpse. It was forbidden to remove the cloth from the face of a deceased loved one, but she did anyways. When had rules ever applied to her? She had to see the face of her mother to realize that she was truly gone. Her face was still beautiful, despite the ravages of her illness. Yet, she was so pale. And Fuu's hands moved on their own accord to reach out and touch the face of the only family that acknowledged and loved her. She didn't expect the skin to be so hard. It was like touching a piece of stone. There was none of the usual softness and warmth. Her mind could not accept what her eyes and hands were telling her, so she just sat back and stared for a while. In that moment her entire life had changed. She was alone.
Fuu shook herself from the awful place her mind had taken her. All her life, she had felt out of place and alone. When her mother passed on to the next life, she had thought that she would always be alone and unable to allow anyone else into her life. Yet, fate had dropped these two right into her lap and they had wormed their way into her heart.
She wrapped the two men in as much cover as she could muster from the shelves of belongings that Kato had retrieved from her father's hut. Every spare article of male clothing along with all spare blankets were heaped on her loved ones. She looked around a moment and decided that when the sun reached the angle in the sky where it streamed across the shed floor, she would drag them to lie in the sun and soak up as much warmth as possible.
She had seen boys in her gang suffer such grievous wounds and knew that lowering of the body temperature was a dangerous side effect of massive blood loss. With a loving caress to each of their faces, Fuu dragged her own self over towards the door to sit in the tiny square of sunlight that streamed in. Gingerly, she prodded at her own stomach to assess the damage to her internal organs from the numerous blows she had received to her abdomen while in the clutches of that evil man with the eye patch.
She was no stranger to getting the crap kicked out of her. After all, she had been disguised as a boy for most of her life, and a short, scrawny one at that. She had faced her fair share of bullying and abuse until she ingratiated herself to two of the bigger boys with her sharp wit and clever solutions to problems. Shinto and Kai had taken a liking to her and chased off the bullies. It was how she had been inducted into the gang. A smile graced her face as she remembered how awkward and clumsy she had been, and how the bigger boys took her under their wings. Where they had set ways of doing things in the gang, she had come up with better alternatives that earned them more money and respect. Of course, only Shinto and Kai knew where the ideas came from. Fuu was in no way interested in receiving credit for the plans. She had no aspirations for leadership or conquest. She just wanted a place to belong. And as the child of an absent, disgraced, presumed-dead, samurai, there were not a lot of options.
She knew what to expect from her injuries. If her ribs were truly not broken, then she would suffer from pain and bruising for a week or two, then it would diminish. As for her stomach, she expected bruising, swelling and pain. If her injuries were bad enough, she knew that she would have difficulty keeping anything down, and might be bleeding inside. She had seen other boys beaten worse than her who suffered with weakness and fainting. One she had even watched over who eventually died. Seems that if you get hit hard enough in the gut that it can damage internal organs. She shuddered, what a horrible way to die.
Shaking her morbid thoughts, she closed her eyes and rest her head back against the wall to relax her aching muscles. The warmth of the sunlight soaked into her body making her sleepy. With Kato temporarily out of the area, she felt there was nothing wrong with sliding down the wall and taking a nap in this sunbeam. She could technically guard the doorway from intruders and get some rest at the same time. It reminded her of a stray cat she had adopted as a small child. Always sleeping in the sunshine.
She wasn't sure if she actually drifted off to sleep. She felt truly relaxed and her mind drifted away from the pain and worry of the current situation and revisited happy memories. There were a few from childhood, when her father was still around. Some memories surfaced from her time with the gang. The short time after she staged her own death for the gang, and indulged her mother in "playing dress-up with Fuu" replayed in her thoughts. Then there was the fun of arguing with Mugen and trying to read Jin's mind.
The two men had taken up a great deal of her thoughts over their journey. She had at first thought Mugen was like Shinto and Kai when he walked into the tea house. He would have fit right into their gang if he had been around seven years earlier. Maybe that was why she jumped at the chance to have him help her. She had been sitting around, waiting for the opportune moment to get out of town without alerting her pursuers. Then, fate dropped Jin in her lap also. What a stroke of good fortune. It had never occurred to her to ask them both to help her find her father, until she had seen them both so beaten in the holding cell, waiting for their execution at the hands of that corrupted official.
Fuu had never been the kind of girl (or boy while in the gang) that could walk past an injured animal and not help. Neither could she stomach injustice. These men had not started the fire, and they had not taken the life of the Governor's son. They did not deserve to die, and they did not deserve to be tortured. Yet, they were strong enough in heart and mind that they had not broken. When she saw them lying on the ground in that cell, she had the thought that they had probably not even hollered out during the worst of the pain. She respected that strength. She respected their independence.
She had always thought of herself as honorable, but she was not above doing slightly dishonest things for a good cause. She never thought twice about using her double-sided coin for the coin toss. She knew she had to keep them from killing each other. There were too few men willing to die for their principles left in this twisted world, and she would not stand by and watch one die for the sake of a grudge. Besides, she had broken them out of jail. The guards had seen her face. She didn't know if they recognized her as the boy that had terrorized them two years before, but they would be able to identify her if the shogun's men questioned them. She had to get out of town. And she knew her best way to survive was to somehow make these two warriors indebted to her.
She cracked an eye open and looked at the battered bodies of her friends as she thought more. She never could really think of them as samurai. I mean, Mugen was as far from the image she had of her father as a little child as was possible to get. In her mind, a samurai was tall, broad, silent, distant and god-like. Samurai followed their master's orders without hesitation or thought. Her father had been placed on an impossible pedestal in her childish mind that no ordinary man could live up to. It wasn't until she hit about nine years old that her adoration turned to anger. Other kids' fathers were still around. Some of her gang friends were fatherless like she was, but their fathers had died in wars. Hers had just left.
She thought of Mugen and Jin as warriors more than samurai. Even Jin, with his code of honor, had been so emotionally injured that he still carried a strong feeling of vulnerability and sadness that she could empathize with. Maybe it was this anger and sadness of being abandoned and outsiders that had united the three travelers. She and her warriors.
Yet, in their travels, they had changed. Each of them. Mugen had become a bit more thoughtful and less impulsive. She had actually witnessed Mugen taking cues from Jin when it came time to jump into a fight. Let's face it; even Mugen could see that Jin was a master strategist. Jin had opened up and become more caring. He no longer distanced himself from people in expectation that they would betray his trust. Shino showed his depth of emotions just in what he had been willing to do to save her.
Fuu's smile faded at the thought of that woman taking away her Jin. Yes, she knew she should not be possessive, but that was just the way she was. She had lost so many things in her short life that she held onto her loved ones with the fierceness of a fighting dog. How many nights had she laid awake pondering the depths of Jin's feelings for Miss Shino. Did he love her? Did he just feel pity for her? Did he feel responsible that he stopped her from killing herself, so he felt guilty for her suffering in the brothel? Did he just see an honorable woman trapped into a horrible situation she could not escape from? Did he see her as a kindred spirit? No matter what, Fuu did not like her. Shino was at the bottom of Fuu's list of favorite people, only outranked by people like Sara and the other assassins and Kohza.
Her brows really drew together as she thought of Sara's betrayal. How could the woman travel with them, eat and sleep with them, pretend to be a friend to them, then try to kill one of them to stop their quest. Fuu had never felt such a pain as she did the night she threw herself atop Mugen's bleeding body to stop Sara from killing him. Not only had she realized that Sara would kill Mugen, but had probably already killed Jin. The betrayal cut into her worse than Sara could ever have injured her with that strange spear.
That was another thing the three travelers had in common. Not only were they each alone in the world, but they had all been betrayed in the most horrible ways by supposed friends. She knew no life was perfect, but it seemed that between the three of them, they had suffered more than most. But, being who she was, Fuu couldn't fixate on the negative. If they had not been hurt so, then they would not have met and become friends. For, they were that at least. Sara had not succeeded in killing them. Mukuro had not succeeded in killing them. This latest batch of assassins had not succeeded in killing them. The Shogun had not succeeded in killing them. Maybe there was something special about the three of them together that was stronger than any of them apart.
But, she knew, that after this episode that they would have to part. It was inevitable. For one thing, they were just too visible and memorable traveling together. One girl with two strikingly different men was note worthy. Even if they toned down their appearance like she had imagined, the one girl, two guys thing was scandalous enough to draw attention. It was obvious that the two men were not related to her. None of them favored in a familial sort of way. And then there was the whole pirate and ronin thing. Not a pair that one would expect to see strolling through the market place.
The other reason they would have to part, was there was no longer a quest. The guys had fulfilled their part of the bargain. There was no longer a debt of honor to uphold. Their journey was complete. She felt a bit deflated at this notion, not knowing what she was supposed to do now. She was reminded of the frighteningly insightful comments Sara had made as they prepared for sleep that one night. Asking her if she wanted this journey to last forever. Her whole life had centered on this goal, and now that she had achieved it, there was nothing beyond it. She had no idea what to do now. Should she just go back to where she started? Should she stay here? Should she set out on another new adventure? She snorted at this point. As much as she loved traveling with Mugen and Jin, she did not really see herself as the "lone traveler" type of girl. I mean, come on… how many times had she been kidnapped on this little trip? If she set out on her own, she was sure to end up in a brothel or as a sex-slave or something equally horrible.
So, what exactly was she to do now? She truly wished there was some way for the three of them to stay together. It was comfortable. She didn't want to face the unknown alone. Besides, she and Mugen still needed to corrupt Jin more. And she and Jin needed to civilize Mugen more. She half wondered what Jin and Mugen were teaching her. Courage? Risk taking? Strategy? Dependence?
Trying to foresee the future always caused Fuu's stomach and head to hurt. Now that she already had pain in both these areas, she wisely decided to stop this line of thought and save it for another day when she felt better. For the immediate future, she needed to heal, and needed Mugen and Jin to heal as well. Possibly Jin could shed some light on what she should do now. With having found her father, and him dying at the hands of the assassin, she was truly more like the two warriors than she had been before. She had a goal before, when they had none. She had a living relative before, when they had none. Maybe she would adopt their ways of life instead of returning to her previous one. I mean, how bored would she get working at a tea house for the rest of her life when she had experienced such amazing adventures. As it was now, she could barely stand working at one of those boring jobs long enough for them to earn enough money for food, lodging and traveling. How much worse would it be if it was for the rest of her life.
Then again, there was always the option of finding a man and getting married. The only problem was that she had lost any hope of a good marriage when her father's name was disgraced. The best she could hope for in a match would be some poor farmer's son, and she just couldn't see herself living that kind of live either.
A thought struck her like a ray of sunshine. What about going back and asking that ex-sensei monk? He had seemed so wise in the ways of the world and Buddha. Surely he could help her make sense of the rest of her life. If not, at least, it would be a goal. She could carefully backtrack the way they had come, so it wouldn't be uncharted territory. And she wouldn't have to cross any dangerous checkpoints. Also, the monk was a skilled ex warrior. Maybe he could help her if the Shogun's assassins somehow found her. She might even be able to wear her old disguise of boys clothes and get some training? The possibilities were endless.
So with the thought of waiting to plan the rest of her life until she could get Jin's and the monk's advice, Fuu relaxed and drifted off into a pleasant nap in the sunshine.
OoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooO
Reviews are welcome and would be helpful