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There were a lot of things that Baiken wouldn’t admit. In many ways, she was a closed-off fortress of a human being (and even that was in contention sometimes) unless slowly, meticulously coaxed into lowering the drawbridge to let something in. You couldn’t force your way through, physically or psychologically. A rare few could lay claim to that feat, and even then, they’d only been allowed into the courtyard, never the innermost sections. Those remained a forbidden city, a place for her to sit with her thoughts. Even as some people pounded at the walls outside, they remained unbroken.
Baiken was waiting for everyone to realize that she wasn’t worth it. Wasn’t worth anything at all.
Of course, to an outsider, she appeared nothing less than haughty. Such condescension! Such a disdain for everyone around her! Clearly, it meant that she viewed herself on a higher pedestal than others. A master swordsman, a long-lived refugee of those blessed with the power of ki, kept alive through sheer spite and willpower. Everyone else had to look like worms crawling in the dirt. That just made sense.
It was something she mulled over for years. Never went out of her way to correct, but never understood it, either. If everyone really believed that, then she wondered why some were still so stubborn to try and change her mind. After so long, she expected everyone would have given up. Hoped they would.
She chalked it up to her facade. The more mysterious something was, the more people were drawn to it, that was how it worked, didn’t it? One of the few things more powerful than fear was curiosity. Baiken wanted none of it. Couldn't stomach the thought.
And the admiration, some idiots over the years had thought of her as not only something to not hate but to aspire to. She would have laughed if it didn’t make her ill. Of course she was powerful. Of course she was durable. Of course she pushed against impossible odds, no matter what. She had taken endless sorrows and came out stronger. Resilience through suffering.
Why would that be something she’d ever wish on anyone else?
Other people deserved to be happy. Baiken did not. She had chosen her path in life. Even if she tried to diverge from it, some tiny voice in the back of her head, ever-persistent, argued it was undeserved. Happiness was for other people. Peace was for other people. She could try all she wanted to be a good example for the young ones in her life, but the goodness only ran skin-deep. Everyone else around her lived genuinely, but she was nothing but hollowness on the inside. Baiken wasn’t real in the same way that they were. None of Anji’s conviction. None of Eri’s genuine kindness. None of Delilah’s forgiveness. None of Iroha’s love.
She was just waiting for all these absurd, idealistic dreamers to realize what was right in front of them.
/
Anji often wondered if Baiken could even fathom how much he loved her. Not in the romantic sense- though there was plenty of that as well- but just for the fact that she existed.
There weren’t many like them anymore. There hadn’t been many to start, back when their home was wiped off the face of the earth, but the number had dwindled even further with time. They were of a dying kind. And they survived how they had to. They hid. They cowed to the force of the governments that ran the colonies. Made deals. Faked names. Vanished off of the face of the earth.
Not Baiken. Baiken did none of that.
He loves that she lives. That she exists genuinely. Despite her bone-deep wrath softening with time, he has never doubted for a moment that any of it wasn’t genuine. Baiken wasn’t a facetious person. She found no reason to lie or deceive. Giving up had always been a choice, and it was one that she never took. It didn’t matter if it was the harder choice. Baiken did what she thought was necessary, and often said as much.
Anji admired that. He respected it. Even envied it at times.
Because Anji was fake. An artificial personality atop an artificial existence. Even the name he was most known by wasn’t genuine. Peel back a layer of falsities, only to find another beneath. Take off the mask and see the next in a stack. If, in a fit of manic desperation, one ripped apart mask after mask, persona after persona, and dug down deep under endless layers of mummy wrappings to reach the core, what would be there to find?
He doesn’t even remember anymore.
But the least he can do is try to impart some good, before everyone realizes how much of a fraud he is and chases him away. He almost wants to pretend Baiken’s sense of peace was in part his own doing.
(Baiken still keeps in contact with him. Even after all these years, she doesn’t run at the sight of him. Sometimes he can swear she almost doesn’t hate him. Like he’s done anything to justify it.)
It’s that strength of Baiken’s that draws people to her. For all his glib talk, it never makes people stay. He turns their heads, but they always turn away not long after. Anji can make allies, but he can’t make friends. Faked fancy pleasantries can’t commiserate with wounded little sisters and make them feel seen. Flattery didn’t earn the trust of traumatized children who were terrified of scalpels yet now found a katana’s blade a source of comfort because of the one who gripped the handle.
Baiken is terrifying, a force of nature, and never pretends she isn’t anything but. A cactus covered in spikes from toe to tip, but things still come to take solace and shelter under her shade. All of his pleasant fakery couldn’t measure up to something like that.
But still, for some reason, she seems to see something valuable in him. Something worth keeping. It gave him some hope, however slight, that a failure of a man like himself could ever be something worthwhile.
/
Eri doesn’t like it when they frown.
She knows there are sad things in the world. She knows that really well. It shouldn’t bother her at all to see frowning faces, sad faces, faces full of discomfort and unhappiness. But it hurts to look at. Most of all when it’s them. Baiken-san and Anji-san and Delly-neechan. Miss Bird always smiles, but sometimes her smiles are sad. Eri isn’t quite sure how a smile can be sad, but some part of her just knows.
Learning is something she’s done a lot of since they took her in. Lots of big things, like how to read long words and measure water and tie different knots. Eri picks up on small things in between, like how to stay out of Baiken’s blind spot so she doesn’t lose track of her, or how to sit when Miss Bird carries her so her arms don’t squeeze her ribs as much, or how to hold a fan the way Anji does to cool herself on hot days.
Here is safe. Here, with Baiken and all of her friends, this is what her mind thinks of when she imagines what ‘safe’ is. Big, strong people on all sides.
She isn’t strong. Her powers can do a lot, but she isn’t strong. The others have to do just about everything for her. Baiken opens jars and unscrews bottles. Anji gets things off of high shelves. Miss Bird cooks. Delilah stands up for her and teaches her. They all give her lessons. Eri is the fragile little thing they all have to keep an eye on and keep safe, or else she’d go off and wander into traffic or something.
Eri smiles a lot more than she ever has. Most of them really are real. Every once in a while, though, she makes a smile bigger than she really feels. It makes everyone happier when she does. She hates lying. She isn’t really sad. But she doesn’t want everyone else to be sad, either. She isn’t strong enough to protect anyone like they do for her, so she does the one thing she knows. She smiles.
Delilah tells her that dreams don’t mean anything. That they’re fake. It’s a relief. Sometimes, Eri has bad dreams. Most of them are about Mr. Kai and his friends. They’re scary, but she knows they aren’t going to hurt her anymore.
The real scary ones are the ones she has about them. Her family. Sometimes she dreams that all of the kind things they did were fake, that they just wanted her for the same reason Mr. Kai did, to use her and then lock her away when they don’t need her anymore. Other times, she dreams that bad people come and hurt her family, just because they know who she is.
When she wakes up from the bad dreams, Eri grabs at the blankets and tries to keep quiet. She doesn’t cry. Her powers were supposed to be for hurting people. That’s what she had been told. That’s all she was good for. She doesn’t want to think that she’s still hurting people, even accidentally. Nobody should get hurt because of her.
But still, she smiles.
/
It must be pity. That’s why they all put up with her. Nothing but pity.
She’s twelve years old and her life is already over. She isn’t like Eri. The kid’s been through hell and back and still smiles with those big chubby cheeks and calls her ‘oneechan.’ Delilah doesn’t understand how Eri can forgive like that, but it only makes her feel guiltier.
Baiken has way too much patience with someone like her. They all do. She’s certain it’s just because Baiken sees a kindred spirit. An echo of what she used to be. But that’s the thing. Delilah isn’t like Baiken. Nowhere near as strong or resilient. Nobody is like Baiken, but especially not her. She’s just an awkward, pathetic failure of a person surrounded by giants. Even the six-year-old dwarfs her in scope.
She betters herself through guilt. It’s harder to feel self-pity when Baiken talks about how her and Anji fled the smoking crater of their home, or how Eri was picked apart and put back together by the man she called a father. Her loneliness feels like a pittance in comparison. Maybe it’s intentional. They want her to look at herself, realize how stupid it all is, and get on with everything.
…And god, she wishes it were that easy.
Still, she tries to make some use for herself, even if she feels rotten on the inside. She tidies away Eri’s nightmares when she wanders into them, replacing sterile metal and white bandages with cozy picnics and gardens. She lends a helping hand around town. Though her sense of coordination is still shaky, Baiken still teaches her self-defense, and she tries her best to copy the moves correctly so she can keep Eri protected. When the strange bird-woman asks, Delilah helps her with the cooking and cleaning the dirty dishes afterward.
She feels mediocre. That’s the only fitting word she can find. Sure, she has magic, but very little of it can be consciously controlled. It isn’t useful. She only serves a use as an average, damaged little girl. She can’t justify her existence with anything worthwhile. It’s only a matter of time before everyone knows how redundant she is.
…But a small part of her hopes it takes them a while to notice.
/
Birds fly. Of course they do, that’s what makes a bird a bird. Everyone knows that. To travel, to move to and fro, to hunt and catch. The elegance and romanticism of it often make people forget the other reason why they do it.
Birds fly to escape.
Because a bird, in the end, is just as much a coward as any other animal. Once it knows it's been bested, it flees beyond where it can be caught.
Iroha is happy here. She’s no fool. She knows how lucky it is that she ended up where she was. There was no guarantee that her rescuer would be an altruist. It was likely that they would have just taken the chance for an easy meal. Plenty more would have taken her oath of servitude and wrenched all they could from it. In the time she spent tangled in the net, wings twisted and useless, she had pondered a future with a rescuer that wanted nothing of her but a body to use. Not a true lover, just a glorified doll. It was a better future than a slow, miserable death in the wild, but it was a thought she accepted with grim necessity over any sort of want.
Master Baiken isn’t like that. She’s a bit odd, certainly, and rather harsh, but that harshness never comes out as violence towards her. For all her outbursts, Iroha has never been left with a single wound.
Iroha knows how they hurt. Not just Baiken, all of them. It wouldn’t take a genius to realize that, but she was rather astute. Her master, her master’s concubine, and their children. Of course Iroha views them as her children as well. Many cranes live in flocks. It only makes sense to raise them collectively. But that means their sadness is also her responsibility as well. She feels a smidge of guilt at not knowing the same sorrows as them, but such thoughts are unhelpful. Instead of wallowing in self-flagellation, she does what she can to help.
None of them have lived a happily domestic existence. They are all runaways, fugitives, victims, outcasts. She gives them the joys that life has so callously deprived. All of her finest feathers make a weave to craft beautiful cloth and tapestry to decorate the home and wrap around in blankets. Polishing their belongings. Offering praises. Shifting skins and taking the children on little flights above the treetops, letting them spread their arms and feel the wind. Whatever delights she can offer, she gives.
They sit for dinner as a family, surrounding a table stacked high with warm food she made with love. They smile, but smiles are always temporary. It leaves a coldness inside her. Even if she knows they can’t be perpetually happy, it always feels as though she’s failed. Failed at being a proper lover and mother, unable to bring them a sense of ‘true’ joy. All she does is mask the deeper wounds.
Iroha doesn’t know how to cure them. So she cooks another pot of soup and tells her spouses that she loves them, and tells their children that they make her so proud.
It will have to do.