She yawned as she lowered the bucket slowly into the old stone well. It had been one of those days, where the effort of the day's labor burned into her bones, and she was ready for the day to be done. Before that, though, the tables had to be scrubbed down, the lamps extinguished, the few last souls lingering in the teahouse gently led to the exit. The old cook was in the back, laughing gaily with one of them. She smelt something delicious, wafting through the back door, something fried and spicy. She smiled. She liked the cook, who was a gruff man with pepper-gray hair and twinkling dark brown eyes that seemed to be permanently mischievous. He was friendly to her, in an unassuming way, and after all the things she had seen-all the horror she had suffered, she had come to realize-it was refreshing to know that there were still people in the world who smiled without malice, who talked lightly without a need to deceive.
Still good people, she thought, even in these days of war. And she thought back, back to them, those two whose memories lay lightly under her skin, finding their chance to break free whenever she thought about how she'd ended up here, in this small town not terribly far from Nagasaki. From Ikitsuki. She had gotten tired of wandering, not long after she'd left them, realizing the road had lost its charm, that it seemed a harder, colder place when she was alone. She'd wanted a place to call home. A place to create some memory of her life, where people would remember her name. She settled on the next town she passed through, not far from the great city.
It had taken some time to find a place to work that wasn't an offense to the senses, and for a while she slept under doorways and in alleyways, sneaking away with the light of day, before the shop owners could throw their washing water at her. She'd managed for a while throwing dice at a gambling house—which she had to admit to herself she enjoyed quite a bit—but the general desperation of her customers, most of whom were burnt-out sailors and traders looking for a quick buck and a quicker sink into an alcohol-fueled stupor, and the usual foul temperament of the yakuza guards had compelled her to try her hand at other skills. The teahouses had been where she'd started out, after leaving her mother and heading to Edo, and so she want back to them. She'd gone from place to place, not knowing what,exactly, she was looking for, but knowing that she would stay when she had found it. She'd come upon this one during an afternoon stroll, when she was trying to ignore the gnawing ache of hunger in her belly. The place was airy, dark stone floors and low wood tables, and the patrons, she noted, were happier than most of her previous customers in the gambling house—arguing over this and that rumor with a warm pot of tea and some snacks to share, sometimes yelling praise at the cook, sometimes singing to those girls they could never quite face directly.
The swirl of life captivated her, and she begged the old cook for a job. At first, she worked in the back, cutting and chopping vegetables and slicing up the fresh fish for the day, tending to the fires and coughing her lungs out over the smoke of the coals. The cook, who was far less chipper with her back then, grinned as she wiped the sweat from her brow and yelled over the the sounds of frying and flames: "I'm gonna abuse you like a workhorse, you hear? Ain't nothing gonna get to you if you don't put your blood into it." At first, his threats terrified her, but she gradually came to realize they were simply his way of saying care about your work, for no one else here will. For a while, she'd seen this job—this temporary stop—as a chance to recuperate a bit, before she went on her quest to find a new home.
But she didn't leave, or more accurately, she simply couldn't. Maybe she hadn't realized that sometimes home sneaks up on you-that the memories begin to bind you ever more tightly to the place where you rest your feet, where you eat the salt of your toil. Or maybe she simply hadn't realized just how pleasant the sense of fixity—of knowing that this place was yours in ways no other place could be—was. She lived in a room above the teahouse, sparsely decorated, with a low bed and a coal brazier for heat in the winter time. In time, she thought, it would better reflect her quirks. But for now it was fine as it was-the start of a new life, the final settling into a much-wanted home.
She pulled up the bucket, water sloshing noisily as she steadied her hand, and walked back inside. Most of the patrons had left-one, however, was dozing noisily in the corner. She put down the bucket by the door, snapping her washing rag as she walked breezily up to the patron. The cook grinned toothily as he scraped grease off his pans. Sleepers faced the worst of her fury, and it had been quite a while since someone had been chucked headlong out of the teahouse, sopping moldy rags tossed after their heads.
"Excuse me, sir," she said, in a voice that would be saccharine if not for the tensile strength of each syllable, sharpened headily to a knife's edge.
A drowned moan rumbled out from the prone figure, "Ungahh…." The sleeper shifted his weight slightly, dropping head beneath dark loose sleeves, trying to shut out every speck of light and thought and human interference. The dreams were coming to take him, and he'd be damned if he would be pulled away, so close to the edge.
Fuu straightened, half-glanced at the cook, who was barely suppressing his laughter. She grit her teeth—he was a rather large man, she had to admit—and bellowed, in tones that would call the dead back to life ablaze in righteous fury, "WAKE UP, SIR!" and snapped the damp rag so close to face it nearly caught-mold, ancient dirt and all-in his open jaw. Then, without changing her merciless expression, she leaned down and yanked him forward, allowing his weight and general incompetence to deliver him, bone-crunchingly hard, to the floor. His eyes bulged out has his body roughly dragged his spirit back into awakening, and he stared, terrified, up at the demon he thought had come to claim his due.
Fuu smiled, milky teeth glistening in the light from the wax-paper lanterns, and said, "Your tab, sir." The tone was effervescent, bubbly, seemingly bereft of the deadly force that had haunted it but a minute ago. She bowed low, meeting his startled, half-lidded gaze, and handed him a crisp scrap of parchment. He looked dully at the numbers, and then back at her, with that catlike grin. He thought better of it, and pulling a purse out from the depths of a miraculously uncrumpled sleeve, laid some gold coins on the table, before pulling himself up.
She took a good look at him-he'd have a nasty bruise over on the side of his face that had met the floor, but besides his dazed composure, he would live, and live well, it would seem. She breathed a sigh of relief. There were days she'd had to drag passed-out souls through the back door and pour hot dishwater down their faces to get them to stir. This was mild, all told. "Many thanks!" she exclaimed brightly, pocketing the change before turning away sharply, tying up her loose sleeves, and getting to work wiping down the table.
The man seemed to hesitate, almost as if he wanted to ask her something, before shaking his head and turning away, shuffling towards the exit. "Fuu," he called out as he lifted the curtain, "good night, dear." He left before she could respond, and had he waited, he would have seen what he waited for, perhaps-that quiet smile that only genuine contentment could bring. It lay on her features for a moment before slipping away, and before her thoughts turned, as they always did, to that one road lined with sunflowers, to the man who had haunted her, and the men who would not abandon her.
She moved quickly, arms working in circular motion along the tabletops. I wonder, she thought, if they're at peace. If they had stopped running. For surely, there was no greater reward for an eternal wanderer than to find the one place from which he is not forced to flee.
She remembered Shino's silhouette in the rain, remembered her own desperation as she ran through the streets, looking for Jin, hoping he was not yet lost, praying he was not yet dead. And her relief, her expansive relief, to see them at the riverbank. Her relief, she remembered, seemed to pale in comparison to Mugen's, who said nothing of import (as was his way) but was all sword and flight and relieved fury.
Shino, she thought hazily, you damned well better be there for him.
She thought of him, the lean Ryukyu man, yawning as she started to extinguish the table lamps, one by lonely one. She hoped, somewhat contrarily, that he was still fleeing from the things that he despised (which seemed to be a good chunk of the world and its inhabitants), that he still had that half-crazed grin and that wild lust for blood. She could not imagine him tied down, to any place, to any land. Some things could never be caged. And yet, and yet, he had come back, through terror and blood, through sea and sand, when she had needed him. When she had simply wanted him to live, because she had nothing else left in the world.
She did not know how to repay that debt just yet. How does one say thank you, for coming back from the brink of the netherworld? For refusing to leave this life for what—surely for him—was a more peaceable existence? She straightened up, scanning the darkened teahouse for any orphaned streaks of dirt or stain, and finding none, closed the front door, setting the heavy iron bar into place, and headed to the back stairs, up to her tiny room, where she would watch the stars, and send to her wanderers all the luck she could gather.
She heard a few rattles as the cook set the last of his pans in their shelves, and then nothing, but the cool stillness of the wind, the blank light of the waning moon.