Ryou Atsumi knew very well that she was a bad girl. Her father had told her often enough, before her mother had walked, though he only hit her, now. He'd hit her mother as well, and she'd told Ryou she was a bad girl. It was the village's general opinion that the daughter of a woman who'd left three small boys with her drunk of a husband, most likely to prostitute herself in Tokyo, had to be a very bad girl indeed.
She'd have been an idiot - a dead idiot - not to use the only advantage life had dealt her. In the years since her twelfth birthday, Ryou had stolen almost everything she could carry off. Money from pockets, linen from hedges, knick-knacks or scraps of food from sleepy stallholders in the village market. Travellers or pilgrims often found their purses lightened by a girl with a feline smile; whether for a train fare, a dying grandmother's medicine, a broken heirloom vase, or averting the wrath of a fictional violently protective husband. If she kept her scams small, as Ryou had learnt, her victims rarely even complained to the village watchman. They had good names to uphold, after all.
The whole district knew how she lived, but she'd gotten no worse than a beating whenever she'd been caught. The village knew what her father was, and knew their money was all that went to feed and clothe her little brothers – though most of it went to her father and the sake shop, or she'd get another beating off him. No one had ever offered her paying work or put in a complaint about her father. It was a man's own business how he kept his house in order, even if it were the hovel of a shiftless down-and-out. Their little village in Chiba was a tight-knit, enchantingly rural community, where every family was tied to most of the others by blood and long residency. Even the village drunk and his delinquent daughter were threads held in the deep, rich history of quiet and endurable misery.
Girls her own age – most of them at least three years married – would not have spoken with Ryou for all the tea in China. Men of all ages shouted indecencies whenever she walked a street in daylight, desperately plotting as to where her brothers' next meal or pair of shoes might come from. She still had to answer the catcalls, sharply enough to not look weak, nor so boldly as to invite a flung stone. Even for bad girls, things turned out better if you kept smiling.
Older women clucked about her poor brothers in that awful shack; Ryotaro, Keita and little Yamato were too adorable to be hated, but their many schoolfriends never came home to play. Ryou supposed her brothers might have despised her with more reason than others did - but their simple, unbounded love had been her life's only blessing.
On sunny afternoons, whenever they could afford to heat the water, they'd drag the big wooden tub out together to the backyard. While their father belched in his sleep, Ryou would lather up her brothers' hair and splash them clean. She felt Keita and Yamato squirm with joy against her bare skin, giggling like happy babies instead of seven and nine. Ryotaro would smile across the steaming water, her dear little man, and joy would press in vain against the close, hard walls of her heart.
It had been an insolvable Zen koan to her for years; how her mother could've ever left the boys, and how she could have endured such a husband for twelve years or any part of the same. Ryou had been something of a friend to the only genuine prostitute the village had owned, until she'd drowned herself in the millpond, when Ryou had been fourteen. So she knew where it was more likely her mother had gone than Tokyo.
She'd known since the time she'd been caught, but not beaten – hands laid on her, until she kicked out, tried to tear off her own skin as she ran – that a bad girl could be ripped to pieces with another step off the path that men had marked for her. She couldn't leave her brothers, but that cowardice was all that kept her from smothering their father in his stinking sleep.
Even their little village had a government school, albeit with one elderly teacher who dozed while boys flicked paper at the girls' side of the schoolroom. So Ryou could read just enough to understand the slim paperback she'd swiped from a stall. She'd thought to sell it, but wouldn't have done so for a big kettle, by the end of a breathless evening's reading by stolen candlelight.
It was the story of a beautiful country girl who'd been kidnapped and brought to Tokyo as a courtesan. She'd finished up as the mistress of a government minister, swimming in every kind of refinement and luxury. Her progress to the head of the oldest profession was shown to be not without difficulty, nor unattainable by any means. That courtesans had more freedom than wives to chose their most intimate partners was asserted more than once or twice.
It was too late for her to imagine it was her mother's story…but it was unmistakably the story of a bad girl. Bad and selfish as the mother she'd cried her last tear for – but what was the use of being bad, if you couldn't get something, one thing, for yourself? One rich and handsome protector, one fortune...perhaps just three more for Ryotaro, Keita and Yamato?
Her boys would follow down the street in dear little suits, as she showed off a green parasol and bonnet. A fine lady, in the emerald silk dress her prince had bought on their last little trip abroad. Every villager who had mocked her would grovel for largesse, and she would torture them with her free and generous offer of forgiveness, like the bad girl she was.
Come the night, she would tuck up the children in their futons, and steal away to some love nest…such a comfortable, precious pair of words. The rushing that had battered and moaned at her heart's gate for years would burst free. It probably wouldn't be lovely as her dream – it would be better than curling up on the floor again, as her father kicked at the base of her spine until he passed out, because she was a bad, bad girl. If only she could've been worse.
-0-
Ryou had been sixteen. Ryotaro had been ten, but she'd no one else to talk to. The fresh-faced little lad heard a somewhat bowdlerised account of his big sister's dreams, attentively but not very happily.
"…I think you should find a good man instead of a rich one, nee-san. Someone who doesn't believe those stupid lies. He should see how good and kind and smart and wonderful you are, inside!"
"Perhaps I could find a good, rich man? I could build us a new house, a mansion for us. You wouldn't have to work. We could have wonderful baths every day."
"I still think if he was rich, the kids at school would say…" The words stuck in Ryotaro's throat, "It's all dirty, horrible lies, nee-san! You ought to get married and get away from that man, and all the money in the world ain't worth more than that!"
"Mmm, ara, ara…" Ryou stroked her brother's trembling brow with her own, "…I'm going to stay here forever, if you keep on being so cute."
"I'm going as well, nee-san." Hollowed at length by hunger and fear, Ryotaro's eyes were still resolute, "When I'm older I'll go to Tokyo and make money, somehow. I'll make enough so you and Keita and Yamato have enough to eat, and that man won't bother you, and everything will be alright!"
Her little man, growing up so fast. Ryou hadn't realised that even little children in the village thought and said that she sold her body. Truthfully, she'd crept off to the surrounding woods several times in her early teens, hand in hand with some hefty, tongue-tied farmboy – none of them had wanted to talk, just find out what the fuss was over. One had told her plainly, he wanted experience before the big night with his fiancé. Ryou had never led her poor, trembling charges past hands - although the villagers would have sooner believed that Mount Fuji was situated in central Tokyo, rather than that Ryou Atsumi was still technically a virgin. It wasn't worth a copper sen, but it was hers to give away.
Her prospects of marrying any respectable farmboy in the province of Chiba or elsewhere was less than nothing, but she'd never minded. She'd been born bad, with no good character to lose. She'd really thought she had nothing to lose.
Growling about his lack of money was her father's sole contribution to the family welfare. He particularly grumbled how a slut daughter he couldn't marry off was useless - as Ryou pulled off his clothes for washing and rolled him from where he'd fallen to his futon. It wasn't until Ryou was sixteen that he came home stinking, as usual, with another man, which wasn't usual. The brothers had gone to bed hours ago, starving but bravely smiling, while Ryou had stayed up to read.
Her father said that the stranger was a traveller, their guest, and Ryou was to entertain him. She said that she'd get out their antique tea set and three-ring circus directly. After some curses her father managed a smile that shook itself to pieces, and said he was going out for something they could drink. His daughter would entertain their honourable guest while he was gone.
Ryou certainly didn't think the stranger was any kind of philanthropist, but she couldn't imagine what was up. If he had money, and from his coat he did, she was confident that some of it would soon be hers. She had turned to search for a couple of cracked cup and their horribly black teapot, when the stranger gripped the collar of her yutaka and pulled her into his lap.
His breaths hot and sharp on her ear. No fearfully reverent boy, he knew what he was doing, and now so did Ryou. She'd been sold, so her hungry little brothers could eat – NO, NO, NO, so her shitbird dad could drink. Sold for the price of a bottle, if he hadn't even tried to get full price for a virgin - not that she gave a damn, when she was about to get raped.
Her scream was brief, before the man slammed her to the floor with her mouth covered. He whispered what he would do if she made another sound, although Ryou was praying that her brothers wouldn't wake to watch what she knew was coming. She thought of the courtesan in the shining city, bad and bold, proud and happy. The whore of a filthy little village, sold by her only father to every man who wanted a filthy, hopeless whore. She prayed to Buddha and all the gods to burst the heaving veins in her neck, just kill her and end the torment, but no god would answer a bad girl's prayers -
"BASTARD! DON'T HURT MY SISTER!"
The broomhandle Ryou's ten-year old brother swung at her rapist's head did little damage, but Ryotaro never stopped swinging or screaming. As little Keita and Yamato cried out as well, the stranger kicked Ryotaro down as he scrambled out of the house.
Ryou still lay on the floor. Her neck, thighs and breast ached as if worse had been done to her. At last, she managed to breathe, and pulled her yutaka over her chest. She saw that the stranger had abandoned his coat, perhaps his money, before she heard what her brother was yelling.
"- please, nee-san, please! Don't sell your body! I know you did it for us, but we'd never want that, I'd rather starve and die! There must be another way, just don't ever sell your body, please!"
Ryou very carefully embraced her beloved brother, who thought with all the world that she was a whore. For his sake, she burnt the coat she could've sold.
Her father came back after an hour, drunk, saying he couldn't go through with it after all. He blubbered that he was sorry, and it meant more to Ryou than she knew it should've. A week later he got drunk enough to try selling his daughter again but had no takers; the story of his first attempt had gone all around the town. He'd been about to paste Ryou for making a fool of him, but something in her eyes stopped him just that once.
As a bad girl, Ryou was no stranger to hatred. She hated her deadbeat father, had hated vanished mother. Hated the man who'd driven horror into her dearest dreams, for a few minutes of fun. Hated the villagers who abused her as a whore and delinquent every day. Hated the teenage housewives who thanked the Buddha every night that they were not Ryou Atsumi. Hated the boys she'd fooled about with, too spineless to ever meet her eyes in the street. Her three little brothers who were always smiling, always demanding she smile with them…always hungry, always needing, taking all she had with all her love…and a tiny whisper of hate that terrified her. She couldn't help herself…there was nothing she could do to help herself.
-0-
Whenever she got fed up with her home life, or her home village got too fed up with her, Ryou was capable of walking as far in wooden sandals as any seventeen-year-old in Japan. There were many other hamlets in the district to steal from, and the big villa outside town. Some moneybags family from Tokyo had built it, and left it unused at least for a decade. The villagers weren't going out of their way to offend such people, rumoured to be as cruel as rich – but why shouldn't folk with money be kind, Ryou thought, when some of the poor were unpleasant enough?
She'd often hung around the old villa. Cobwebbed and gloomy as Princess Takiyasha's haunted castle, it was somewhere she could spend time with herself. She'd leafed through old books she couldn't understand. Played with the other stray cats that lolled and stretched in the dust and envied them.
Naturally, when the news ran all over town that one of the fearful Shima clan had actually taken up residence, Ryou sauntered up to see what was what. Her own secret place had been unsettlingly transformed; there were new books on the shelves, stuff in the rooms, food in the larder. A nest of sheet in a bedroom still dark as a tomb. Breathing, but nothing to trouble Ryou as she collected her brothers' dinner and lined her own stomach somewhat.
The new books, enigmatic as they remained to Ryou's poor literacy, were still intriguing. Some were in English, or translations of English writers. There were translations of Russian books; Ryou's father had fought the Russians, though he had no war stories; he never talked about it at all. The heap of bedclothes had to be quite the clever-clogs – even if a large run of very different paperback serials were secreted in a drawer. Ryou didn't understand everything, but there were quite a few pictures.
City folk certainly did some things differently. Ryou pleasantly squirmed through a little fantasy, culminating in her rich young lover reclothing her body with jewels. A silly, ridiculous dream…although wasn't there a rich boy sleeping alone in the next room? He very likely had a fiancé, some rich ojou-sama with an icicle up her bum…who he'd never get to do the stuff in his dirty books. That poor boy might even be dreaming about it now.
It was the most ridiculous fairytale since Princess Kaguya. Ryou laughed about it all the way home. Laughed and smiled through the midnight feast she shared with her brothers and even her father. What she had was enough, for an instant – but all of it was balanced on a line thinner than a smile, a thread of fate. Yamato had been sick last month, and there'd been nothing she could do but pray. They would all die the same little village, perhaps within the year, without something ridiculous and fantastic.
Two days later, Ryou put on her least-bad outfit. A cheap flowery hairpin she'd lifted and forgotten about, a pink ribbon over her obi, and her favourite green yutaka. She sandal-clopped back to the Shima villa, at least to see to see what the possibilities were.
At about five o'clock, two days after Ryou's first visit, the quivering nest of bedclothes had not moved. There were no servants in the villa, and no less food than they'd been when Ryou had left – none of it had been eaten.
The screen door of Tamahiko Shima's room banged open like thunder. Ryou fell on the smelly nest of bedding and dragged out a pale, shocked boy by his ear.
-0-
Ryou had a lot of experience dealing with sick kids and an incapable father. Within an hour, the boy in the dark villa had been dressed, scrubbed, given notice that he was an absolute idiot, and plonked down facing some fresh cooked rice gruel. Sleeves rolled up, one hand on her hip as the other threateningly swung a ladle, Ryou informed the boy again that no rice meant no life.
Tamahiko Shima stared back at her defiantly. His skin was pale, his eyes big and red. As Ryou had shoved him around, she'd felt his right arm limp as an empty sleeve.
"Whatever troubles you've got, you can't sort them if you starve, or get sick on your own." Ryou sat down beside the boy who did look sick and weak, "Eat. You can do that."
"…can you bring an arm back? With fox magic?" Unhappily as awkwardly, Tamahiko chopsticked a little rice into his mouth left-handed. No educated Japanese believed in the kitsune anymore, but he wasn't joking. The strange, narrow-eyed girl who'd snuck into his house, then pounced on his bed and dragged him from it, only lacked a tail.
"I'm no fox; I'm as human as you are. Here." Unhesitantly, Ryou lifted the bowl so the boy could eat more easily. "When you've got something, it hurts to lose it."
"You don't understand; I've got nothing. Nothing in here." Tamahiko clutched at his chest, as he turned away, "There was never anything I could do…"
"I get that. I thought with no money, no honour, no friends, I had nothing to lose…but I surely did. I'd have learnt that from you, if I hadn't already learnt – can't you learn what you've still got to lose, or get? Or what's the good of all those books, and knowing enough to read them?"
Tamahiko didn't answer, but he reapplied herself to the rice. Something warm stirred in Ryou's chest.
"You should have servants round here," She quipped, "There's room for a harem, or maybe just a housemaid…?"
"Father said…he would send somebody."
"Send somebody? When? I can tell you weren't born with that arm; until you get used to using your left, you should have someone around now. What about your mother?"
"My mother is dead." The statement, its empty resignation, disturbed Ryou more than anything.
"Sorry. What kind of person was she?"
"…I don't know. Everyone just says it must be terrible…"
"Yeah. I don't remember ever having a mother."
The boy and girl sat in silence together. Feeling the loss of what they'd never had.
"Y-you're like a mother," The words rushed from Tamahiko's mouth, "More than anyone else."
"Ara, ara, not yet, I hope!" With a feline smile, Ryou found her own body pressing Tamahiko's side. Against his dead arm, that had no feeling – but her chest felt the answering thrill of a boy who was seventeen.
Then Tamahiko turned from her and burst without words into tears of pain. Not the tears of a rich little boy, but a man tormented to the end of his strength. Ryou knew she couldn't know just why he cried, but even for her brothers' dinner she wouldn't leave him.
-0-
It was about a week before she slept with him for the first time. Visiting every other day, while she took care of her brothers, they hadn't been so much else she could do, except cook and talk. His siblings were apparently as bad as his father, but his uncle might've been a decent old cove – telling him about her brothers brought him close to weeping again. He'd hesitated over reading some of his books to her; from the way he read without looking at the page, Ryou could tell that books had been his only friends for years. Still, when she'd found all his dirty books, as she freely admitted, he saw there wasn't much point in his trying to hide anything.
She was charmed to hear about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, though she complained that Irene Adler would've made a better assistant. Tamahiko hesitated before opening the story of a bold, irresistible femme fatale, by Junichiro Tanzaki-sensei. Ryou was tickled pink – by the shaking of Tamahiko's voice, as he still read on to her. She felt the warmth of new life in his voice and heart, even as shame coloured his cheeks for the weakness where she saw strength.
She knew she didn't have to do much to seduce a lonely teenage boy; she slipped her hands into his yukata as he read and hushed his stammered protests. The shock came when her gloomy, submissive boy suddenly pushed her against the floor and fell on her neck. It scared her a bit, but not like the man who'd tried to buy her; there was feeling with her lover's need. The power of despair that burrowed in his heart, poured into her wicked, selfish body. She felt it, as she finally struggled free from her stupid obi that tied up behind, just like a prostitute's sash didn't. Her bare slimness wriggled from her kimono, as she drew her boy down to her breasts and wrapped her thighs around him.
Too flustered to remember anything from dirty books, they clumsily made their first time as good as they could manage. It was never going to be fun to share all their pain, but it was a precious relief. Ryou felt like weeping for her lover when they'd finished, but he was sobbing enough for them both.
"Ryou-san, I'm so sorry, so sorry! I couldn't, I didn't, what kind of a man would do it…?"
"The man I might be a little bit in love with, Tamahiko-san." She stroked and kissed away his tears. "Yoshi, yoshi. What you did was lovely."
Ryou hadn't been exactly certain of her plans. Pregnancy would've been a risky way of securing her future – overwhelmingly, not only for her and Tamahiko. There would've been easier, realistic ways, to get a bit of money off the rich kid, but it no longer felt awkward helping her boy to wash and dress. She'd been mad to let him finish inside her once, and very lucky, but there were other ways to interrupt washing or dressing with her hands or mouth. Great fun, feeling him squirm with guilty pleasure.
He hadn't covered her with jewels yet, of course; what they shared was more precious than dreams, she thought. She still couldn't imagine being a real mistress, set for life, but she couldn't easily imagine her good, good boy ever leaving her, either. She should've known that her life was still balanced on a thin smile.
After three weeks, Ryou's brothers were suffering quite considerably. She'd barely had a chance to do any stealing in the villages, there was only so much food she could borrow from Tamahiko's larder, and of course her shitbird father only wanted booze money. His anger had risen to the point that he beat Ryou three times in a week – not on her face, she still felt thankful – before she made the fatal suggestion to Tamahiko that he give her some money.
"…I thought…?"
"I've been helping you with cooking and washing. I'll have to start getting more food for you from the village, soon, but it's only fair -"
"…d-do you want me to pay for everything?"
She should said she loved him, that she needed the money – but he'd known about her brothers. She shouldn't have told him so plainly what he was saying she was, and what she thought of him for thinking it – but she screamed it. She'd dreamt of being a courtesan, but she wasn't, and it had somehow hurt like a blade when he'd finally called her a whore.
Tamahiko didn't shout back at her. He simply curled in on himself, like a snail into its shell. He sobbed out that he couldn't see her, couldn't ever marry her – which was obvious – because he was a useless, crippled bit of trash – a terrible lie. It was so infuriating and miserable, watching him deny his own strength and destroy it, that Ryou had to turn on her heel and march from the villa, leaving the boy to his tears.
How had she been so stupid, to give weeks of her life for nothing, her first time for nothing? She had to stop halfway back to the village, crouch down in the darkness and scream, before she could walk home to her brothers, empty handed.
-0-
Over a week later, Ryou finally made herself walk all the way back to the villa. Words, words, words that she might say to Tamahiko, ran through her head all the way. The villa's new transformation, like an enchanted castle, blew it all from her mind. Every window had been thrown open and dusted. Flowers shone in every room; sunset seemingly clung to every room in place of shadow.
With all the stealth of a lifetime's practise, Ryou circled about through the woods near the villa. She slipped through a window, edged round against the screens, and stole one glance. Her lover was sat on the veranda, watching the sunset with a little, doe-eyed thing. The fiancé bought from her poor, tormented parents, as Ryou learnt around the village within the hour.
Cold, shocking sorrow came first; a good boy like Tamahiko would never be parted from a good little girl like that. Even if his shoulders had been slumped lower, his eyes further than ever from peace, while he sat at her side; it was clear that she adored him. That proud, cutesy, tanuki-faced schoolgirl, who looked so happy that her own parents had sold her life and virginity to strangers. All the villagers wouldn't stop saying what a poor, dear, brave girl. Trapped in her slavery to that twisted young cripple of the cursed Shima clan.
Why should that girl receive adoration instead of abuse, because she had been sold as a wife and not a whore? Why should that girl get such gushing joy, by acting the heroine of a romantic dream. Why should her Tamahiko suffer such lying abuse, and the smiling little dependant she alone knew his father had forced on him? Because he wanted a wife, and not –
No. Loving a man did not make her a whore. Loving the poor, brave boy who'd known her, tried to be strong for her. Jewels and silks had been only a dream, lovemaking had been less than that, but she could not do without one more look. Love, first love, was to know and be known by the one who stayed at your side - her brothers had taught her what love was, and neither she, Tamahiko or tanuki-face had known it yet. Desire, potent and utterly human, had slipped into her bones quietly as poison. No flower-fluttery awakening for her, from the poems of dirty old men; she had to go to him once more, or she would die.
She needed him to see her, one more time, and say he'd cared for her as a human woman. Cared for the bloody stupid woman who'd piled her own abuse on his life of misery.
A month passed, before Tamahiko Shima looked on Ryou Atsumi again. He found he seated on the windowsill by his little library, in the deep . Another month passed between them, as green-flecked eyes stared into grey. Then both of them, soon-to-be-eighteen, rushed together without a word. The one arm around Ryou's waist was the strongest she'd ever felt.