Chapter Text
Hanabusa Sumireko is a calm child.
Her mother's birthing assistant raises the baby sunward with bloody hands, the ceremony of life complete as the infant coughs, and cries gently in the shock of the world.
"Yes, I think she'll do well," says Hanabusa's mother, and winces with her lingering pain. "A quiet child will do better to survive."
And she does.
*
Hanabusa doesn't remember much of the first attack, but her nursemaid, Shia, is killed in the offense while Mother is at work. Shia would put out clothes and make the bed, and she would always read stories in a gentle, smooth voice. She called Hanabusa "Little Hana," because the first name, Sumireko, does not have the lofty status that the Hanabusa Financial Clique provides. The real significance in names, of course, is how large a target may be etched on the skin of a girl named Hanabusa Sumireko, just for living.
Either way, Shia's blood was all over Hanabusa when the assassin aimed his gun, face a mask of disinterest as Hanabusa stared up into the dark features.
As she watches, his brains blow out his ears, and a fourth figure glides into the bedroom.
"Happy fifth birthday, dear," says Father lightly, and follows his suited men over the threshold. People are converging on the doors and windows, locking down the area and murmuring into streamlined headsets. Father reaches down for Hanabusa and grabs her wrist, too hard. His nails are perfectly manicured, shaped into professional half-moons. Hanabusa looks at them instead of his face. "You're too weak to live with your mother. My rivals have discovered who you belong to. May as well come with me," he says in a deep, imperious voice, and straightens, still gripping her wrist. "I'll claim you officially, but you'd better be stronger next time." Father drops her arm and strides from the apartment.
*
Hanabusa raises one eyebrow when her tutor approaches her with the test results.
"Excellent work, my dear," he says gaily, and hands her the paper, careful to not let their fingers touch. Servants are good at that.
Hanabusa receives the sheet with a cool grace she's been practicing, and flicks her gaze down the row of letter grades. Perfect scores on all subjects. A cold pride slides through her veins; a frosty sludge. It doesn't feel good enough. And yet...
"Perfect fluency in three languages, and already through college-level mathematics at age ten. Lady Sumireko, you are a marvel!"
"You're fired," she says calmly, and shifts the ornate gilded vase a few inches on her desk, so that the lilies cover her view of the tutor's face. She'd say her flowers were white, but they're paler even that that. They're a gauze-thin sheet of snow, a sun-bleached bone, a white like the exposed flesh of an eye. Marvelous things, beautiful nature.
The tutor gapes. "My Lady?"
Hanabusa gazes through the ivory petals and fixes him with an icy smile. "I can do this on my own. Your services are no longer needed." He nods, shaken, then totters from her study, dirty booted feet smacking footprints into her sumptuous carpeting. She waits a moment with fingers folded, then reaches for her cordless telephone and presses 1.
"Lady Sumireko?" comes the prompt secretary.
"Have a cleaning team come to my outer chambers at once," Hanabusa says airily into the receiver, and spreads her hand to admire her flawless manicure. The soft rose color of the gloss compliments her pale skin wondrously. There's an ugly maroon scar crossing the base of her wrist, where an enemy agent had a go at severing it from her body. She purses her lips at the reminder, and puts her hand on the mahogany desk. "I need my study's carpets cleaned. Also, set up an appointment with a dermatologist. I've a scar that needs looking after." She hangs up without waiting for a response.
*
Hanabusa holds the man's neck in a chokehold as he flails, then plunges his own blade into the base of his shoulder, into an important joint and tendon. She feels the band of muscle sever with a nasty sort of snicking sound and jumps back as he howls in agony. She drives her heel into his stomach, doubling him over, and crunches an elbow into the back of his neck. He topples, and she ends him with a shot from some other person's abandoned gun.
There's only one more attacker, and it's a fledgling with green eyes that shine through the ski mask. He looks nervous. Fear makes them weak. Hanabusa reaches for a firearm on her thigh, a little handgun that is perfect for this scenario.
"Don't shoot," he begs, and drops his rusty machete, hands up, fingers splayed and fluttering in the air like a drummer's rhythm. Or a heartbeat.
"Mercy," says Hanabusa, eyes dancing, "is for the weak."
His blood is so bright against her peach-colored hair.
*
Father comes into her chambers every few weeks, to remind her of her debts and her goals. This visit, he has a new, pretty mistress braced decoratively on his solid arm. Hanabusa puts down her teacup soundlessly and looks up and down the slim, photoshoot-ready body of the delicate brunette in her glimmering ruby dress, and smiles. She knows it's not a nice smile; all teeth, and her eyes are a fetid ocean-blue, the last color a drowning man will ever see.
"Princess," says Father grandly in greeting, and Hanabusa pours him a cup wordlessly, slim fingers elegant against the clear ceramic.
"This is your daughter?" asks the mistress in a pudding-rich tone, all artificial flavor and oozy delight. Hanabusa curls her lip, but in a lovely way.
"My heiress," elaborates Father. "She's got quite the mind there, despite her youth. And she's strong enough to have survived this long." But his gaze, the same rotting navy in the iris as Hana's, glides over her gilded tea set and spotless, bright sitting room with a dismissive eye. Hanabusa feels the boiling shame start up her back, the source of heat at her waist where her gun is tucked. She's not good enough, not yet. Not powerful enough to be an acceptable ruler for her father's company, not a queen. Well. She's only twelve. Hanabusa grits her teeth but smiles so sweetly and politely she almost feels like she means it.
Father and the woman make small talk for a few minutes, then excuse themselves. Hanabusa stays at the table and breathes through the rage.
*
Her daily duties at the company are completed. Hanabusa, irritated from a long week of sitting in on the annual board meetings at the headquarters, is glad to enter the elevator. The urge to mash the "close doors" button is very, very powerful, but she waits patiently with her stony, broad bodyguards while a gentleman in a business suit joins their car and selects a floor only three below the current. She glances at the man sidelong as the elevator smoothly descends.
His balding head and hanging jowls suggest he couldn't make the flights downstairs. Hanabusa silently compares this worker, one of her bees in one of her hives, to herself, and finds a scathing victory in her favor. She's the queen bee. She controls this sweaty little man's entire career and monetary success, and by extension, his life. She's so... powerful. The thought makes her laugh as he exits the car, and her guards say nothing as her teeth click together, shining perfectly as diamonds.
*
Father is a ruthless businessman with little care of the procession of events in the financial company, only that progress and profit are made. He has rivals, so many rivals created by his less-than-ethical practices, and not one of them balks at murder of a girl-child to reap their revenges on a man that steamrolls what seems like the world with a twitch of a finger.
Hanabusa is a flower, a real flower of a girl. She looks like one, with her lovely, petal-open face bordered by the honeysuckle hair that is her maternal inheritance and midnight eyes. She's both the bloom and the bee, the bait and the hunter. Her father molds her into his heir, half out of respect to her mother, whom he loved, and half to taunt his enemies.
In truth, it is mostly to taunt the enemies. He makes her cold. He makes her elegant. She is trained and groomed and immersed and carved into a lovely young girl with a head for negotiations, a slender, perfect body, and a steely delight in aiming for the head.
*
Hanabusa is fourteen, and she is not strong enough to survive the onslaught at the company dinner.
What feels like hundreds (but is probably about thirty) of enemy agents pour into the ballroom and empty magazines into employees. Hanabusa feels an awful string of fear as she sees a woman take aim at Father, and then she feels a blast of terror for herself when a guard leaps at an enemy not three feet away. Hanabusa reaches for her own weapon, only to curse as she's abandoned it in her dressing room. There isn't a great concealment place for a handgun anywhere on her short gold dress, and by the time she's done hating herself for being unprepared, four bullets bury themselves in her arm. She falls, crying out, as the blood starts to really flow in the ballroom, scarlet splatter patterns erupting onto the gleaming wood floors. Her vision is blurring, and impossibly, more pain flashes up her leg as a stray bullet jacket ricochets off a bowl and into her soft flesh. Another few shots find her knees, blowing out bits of cartilage and bone.
She's sobbing on the ground, surrounded by stray bodies, and someone picks her up roughly around the waist. She flails and screams, kicking, scratching and biting despite the blood, despite the massive pain.
"This is the kid that's been giving us so much trouble?" asks a throaty rasp skeptically.
"Put a bullet into her forehead already, she's fucking dangerous," commands another.
"She bit me," says a third man's voice in petulant surprise.
"Shut the fuck up, idiots," the first voice says decidedly. "Plans have changed. He got away... Maybe he'll come out of hiding for this precious little squirt, huh?" They begin to laugh, and Hanabusa feels a touch of panic spread through her torso, combating with the lightning agony in her body.
*
The rescue mission is almost too late.
When the gunshots stop and the fresh waves of blood have stopped splashing on her, Hanabusa hears voices through a thick layer of gauze. Or her ears are broken. Is that possible?
So many injuries. Her left arm has been hacked away, and she's left with the horrid sensation of bone shards in a ghost limb. Covered in deep slashes, bruises, blood. She's basically dead. The rest of her pain, she cannot describe. But it's not going to heal. Not what they did with those knives.
But through some sort of divine willpower, she forces herself to stay conscious as gentle hands she doesn't recognize probe her skin. She almost blacks out, but then she hears her father's voice echoing in the dank cement garage, and hope carries her eyelids open.
"She's alive, then?"
"Through some miracle, sir. But she's got grievous wounds. She's not looking great."
Footsteps. Designer work shoes, ink black. Hanabusa memorized the sounds of those 3,000 Yen flats when she was barely six. She stares at the ceiling, and Father's cool face swings into her vision.
"Her eyes are open," he says conversationally, and the woman at Hanabusa's side, a medic, hums in agreement.
"She's a strong girl. We'll get her all fixed up."
"No, I don't want that," says Father cruelly. Hanabusa's heart stops. He gazes down at her, broken and prone on the bone-crunching floor. "I want you to make her better than what she is now." Hanabusa listens to the soft slap of his shoes on the industrial, bloody floor, and blacks out.
*
When she wakes up next, it's to a queer sensation of emptiness and an irritation at the sunlight streaming into her eyes.
She frowns at the open floral curtains, and makes a move to rise. She jerks against a strap around her midsection, and a beeping noise begins around her head. Hanabusa takes in her surroundings, a hospital bed and an army of machines that bleep and flash and wheel numbers across screens, and reaches to scratch her nose.
A smooth metal hand touches her face, and she screams.
*
A nurse at physical therapy is the first one to really explain to her.
"One hand on each bar, Sumireko. Then step, step, good." The nurse has a hand braced against Hanabusa's lower back as a guide, and Hanabusa hates it. Hates the nurse.
"Why do I need your assistance?" she had snarled when the driver escorted her into the clinic. She was met with raised eyebrows.
"Dear. You've had all four limbs replaced with prototype cyberkinetic prosthetics. You will need training in their use, and therapy for the deeper effects your torture had on your psyche.
Well, the nurse is wrong. WRONGWRONGWRONG Hanabusa can do this, she can do it and she doesn't need anyone rooting about her brain for "deeper effects," torture is torture is torture, and pain is easily forgotten.
She walks the parallel bars until her back is greasy with sweat. Her spine is bent, her hair - for Father wouldn't let the doctors shave it for surgery - plastered against her neck and face. The strength in her new metal parts is incredible - but it's not useful until she's stronger. She's not worth anything until she has perfect control over the bits of her that belong to her father. Her father's money, that is.
She does sit-ups and push-ups and weights to regain muscle, then begins to perfect her fine-motor controls. Writing is hard. Eating is hard. Getting the little metal finger between a teacup handle and the base is challenging. Curling it around the ceramic stand without shattering it is even worse. But Hanabusa persists, because her father hadn't even visited in the hospital. What a failure she must be in his eyes.
*
After the gleeful scientists had sewn on the flesh covering to Hanabusa's limbs, she's felt so much better for being alive. She looks normal, now.
She strides to the mirror. Still a flower. Delicate, supple frame. Huge dark eyes in a pale, blooming face. She's got the look of an innocent schoolgirl down to the wide, airy smile. Perfect.
Hanabusa sits down at her dining table and stirs her spoon absentmindedly in the fruit bowl, clinking the silver utensil against the curved glass edges. Nothing shatters. It feels good. She puts the food aside in her mind, and grasps a sheaf of parchment and a pen, and begins to draw the traditional sweeping characters, writing a note in flawless handwriting to her steward, asking for her golden dress.
*
The next time an assassin breaks into her quarters, Hanabusa approaches him at a walk while he fires, catching the bullets in her palms. She can hear alarm spreading in the floors below her, but her guards are too slow, now. She smiles into the face of the astonished killer, and takes his empty gun slowly from his hands. She meets no resistance, so she crunches the hot metal in her bare hand and shows her teeth as she tears out his heart.
*
She's almost eighteen when she receives a letter. It's written in a simple but winning hand, detailing an invitation to join a very special academy for very special girls, such as herself.
Hanabusa lazily waves an arm at the servant who reads aloud to her, and the man trots over to her wingback chair and hands it off, not touching her cool skin. The letter offers anything in the world to the winner of a strange game. Kill the most powerful girl in the world.
Most powerful! How presumptuous. Hanabusa rises from her plush cushions and crosses her chambers, past a maid dusting the hearth, past the kitchenette where a servant is preparing midday repast, into her bedroom where she's entertained the finest of whores and fools. She gazes at herself in the mirror.
She's strong enough now. She will play this game, then, and she will prove herself.