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Chapter Text

The first time Mizu meets Akemi, she thinks, not another one. Because Akemi's just like Taigen as a bratty kid. They pout a lot, the both of them. They have that haughty look of... looking down at you, no matter who's really taller. 

They both seem to think they're better than her, too—shithead kid Taigen who thought he had her cornered, in the forests and puddled alleyways and cliff edges of Kohama, prized dojo student Taigen who thought he had her bested, in the snowy courtyard; Akemi now, knelt across from Mizu, who thinks she has Mizu fooled with her sweet, simpering courtesan act. 

Akemi bows her painted face and peers through her lashes and compliments Mizu's eyes. No one's ever done that before. Even if it's all hollow flattery, there's a part of Mizu that pauses. She's sure there will be plenty of time for clever insults soon as Princess Akemi knows Mizu knows who she is. 

(But still, no one's ever spared the thought for words about her eyes that aren't insult, disgust. Wariness and noncommittance at best. The sea and the sky are not ugly, pitible things. She wonders how much of it is a vicious lie too, then wonders why she's even considering it like it matters.) 

Akemi pours sake not tea, hot sake not cold, and where I'm from the men prefer it hot—Kyoto, Akemi smiles, her lips drawn red like blood from a cut. 

There's an attempt at courtesy. Mizu almost drinks. Then the ruse is up, and a delicate hand that's held little more than flowers and brushes and fans tries to attack with a tiny paring knife, the spiked sake pot goes flying, the cups crash off somewhere. 

Mizu doesn't hate Ameki. She isn't quite worth hating. There's anoyance at this new deterrent on her tail, there's a quiet amusement at Akemi's flailing attempt at fighting. There's anger at this unbelievable distraction. Though, maybe Mizu should be flattered that both halves of this awful doomed engagement have come running after her personally. 

Unfortunately, Akemi doesn't give up even after failing to kill her the first time, and so Mizu ends up scouring some rope probably not so unrecently used for something sweaty and peculiar, tying her up, and ordering Ringo to stand guard. The captured princess fumes. Mizu grabs her sword and leaves with a final frown. The situation is almost funny, and the entire thing almost, for a second, takes her mind off her business for the night. 

But that was done now and the consequences of that were done with too. 

Madame Kaji's house of peculiarities sits dark and more peculiar than ever now, the rooms inside and entrance strewn with dead bodies and slippery with entrails and chopped off arms and blood. A drip off a rain-purled eave of which is her own. 

The fight is over. The snow is ruddied with a hundred painter's signatures underfoot. Mizu stalks off and tries not to stumble. She finds a side street close enough to put the idea of distance but not so far she won't make it, a small semblance of privacy where she sits and just slumps. She holds her weapon close still and focuses on not breathing too hard. 

Air is raw in her throat and every bone in her body feels cracked and there's still a four-pronged stab wound bleeding sluggishly. More drops wet the proverbial eave. 

Hesitation, she thinks hazily, is exactly her problem as of late. She lost focus when Taigen appeared on the beach as she fought Blood-Soaked Chiyaki, the last of the Four Fangs. She started and stared and wavered today, when that boy with the cart saw her crouched outside Boss Himata's gambling house. 

Mizu leans still and breathing slow until Ringo rouses her, that ever useful bell announcing his appearance trinkling cheerily. She forces her eyes open. The sky is clouded and growling gray with the promise of oncoming snow. 

Ringo cuts a mild and easy smiling shadow. “Master! You did it, you beat them all. An entire army.” 

Mizu groans. The four-claw stab wound is still dripping, seeping slow and steady. She sits up more despite the way it protests, free hand pressed to it. 

Ringo dims as he speaks of the two men Akemi killed, the one man he himself killed. He speaks of a darkness. Mizu wonders if this will be when she finally shakes him off. In all the days he's stuck around as apprentice, now he's faced personally with the reality of the quest she takes, the life she leads, the person he wants to be like. But he stays. 

He's not the only one. Akemi still holds the knife in her fist. Her kimono's been rumpled in the excitement and there's still blood drying on it, on her neck. 

She gives Mizu a look, another looking down from where she stands, further away but not away. When she speaks her voice isn't sharp with hatred or lilted with fake sweetness. “It was most impressive. I've never seen anything like it.” 

“You're still trying flattery?” Mizu blinks and lets her eyes close longer than they should, trying to shake off the sluggishness. 

“That was a compliment,” Akemi huffs. 

Ringo nods sagely, “And very true. His talent and dedication to training are amazing. But you should rest now, master. The revenge boat will wait until the revenge-people-on-the-boat are well again.” 

Mizu grunts. “The boat won't work. But Madame Kaji showed me another way.” 

She forces herself to her feet and leans on the built naganata hilt more than she'd like, smoothing her mouth from a wince. Madame Kaji had told her to sleep the night and then die. The sleeping part, at least, she plans on fulfilling. 

When they emerge back out on the main street, the three noble crested men appear like someone prayed for them, their horses kicking up flurries and trotting between the cooling corpses. 

Daichi Tokunobu wants his daughter back and his men are here to execute his will. Akemi raises her knife and backs her way back closer to Mizu and Ringo. 

The nearest guard grinds his teeth. “Do we have a problem?” 

“I'm not going,” Akemi hisses, defiance lighting her dark eyes on fire. The men step closer and she steps back, ceding, red blade raised threateningly. 

Mizu doesn't know why she does it. On a whim maybe. She's tired and bleeding and bruising ink dark from the fight she's just finished and a part of her she thinks that it'd be for the best, to let this happen. Not all men are bad. Not all men are brutes. The Shogun's son would give Akemi a life any other woman might kill to have, and she might be caged, but her bars would be gilded. 

She's so tired. She can't feel the blood drying on her hands nor the fingers still gripping her naganata. 

She's tired and that's when she works best when she's exhausted and burbling blood. Akemi's not the only one who doesn't know when to stop, to give something up. 

“Mizu,” Akemi says, breath white in the cold air. Someone else's blood is still on her face. “Mizu, do something.” 

It's not a plea, like it would've been from anyone else. It's not a plea, but it's close. Akemi's trying very hard to make it sound like the divine word of a noble girl, who gets all the good choice in their world other women dream of, who's never had to lift a finger in all her life. 

Both her hands are holding the knife in front of her, arms straight taught. Akemi would be much better at this if someone corrected her grip, taught her some things. She wouldn't make a warrior or anything. But she'd be better equipped to help herself. These are the sort of nonsense, muddy, meandering thoughts that denote blood loss, Mizu thinks, shakes her head and tries to shake the fog, and acts on the choice she's made. 

Mizu steps forward. Akemi sighs in the quietest relief and inches further back. The men cracks the slightest grin in Mizu's limp, eyes widening then narrowing at her uncovered eyes. 

“If it isn't the half-breed samurai. Fancy yourself a protector now? Step aside.” 

She says nothing, only shifts on her feet. The men draw their weapons and die before they can use them. She leaves their horses to go; they spook off to random directions quick enough anyway. 

There's fresher blood on her blade now. Peace restored. Mizu stands and doesn't loosen her grip and as the tension bleeds out of her, again, she stands weary, more and more like she's leaning on it as a walking stick. 

Ringo is back to chattering beside her, and Mizu blinks and they're back in front of the brothel, where people are busied with cleaning, pulling the bodies off in heaps to dispose. Akemi is on Mizu's other side, hovering. Her painted red lips, round like circles of bloody sunset sun wedged together, move in the shape of something Mizu doesn't hear. Ringo pauses too and they look at her. 

“Don't be boorish. Where were you hurt? Ringo said he'll treat it by himself, inside... he was weirdly firm about doing it without any help, actually—” 

Her side feels wet like she has held a hanten full of melted ice. Drip, drip. “I'm fine, Princess.” 

Mizu steps forward and crumples face first into the snow. 

Chapter Text

Akemi has come a long way to find the samurai who gave her fiancé a hideous haircut, humiliated him in a duel, robbed him of his honor, and ruined their promised marriage (not necessarily in that order), and when she finally does get to the end of her wild flight at a brothel in Mihonoseki, she doesn't exactly find what she's looking for, but she can't say she's disappointed. 

It starts with a look. 

She sees him—again—across a circle of people gathered to watch a death duel, grouped in a market square. She remembers when she saw him first, preoccupied as she had been preparing to parley about marriage prospects, on a bridge so many days and miles ago it felt like a different lifetime. 

He stands right across from her and doesn't notice her at all. Funny spectacles, a big straw hat, long and sure and blue, sticking out like a lit torch. 

Akemi's heart skips as she sees him there, stirs quicker still as she follows him to the brothel. Inside, she catches sight of him sitting there with his back to the wall, cool as a sea cucumber, and everything in her thrills at nearing her goal at last. 

This is a brothel and there is business, but she's undeterred. Nothing is going to keep her from getting what she wants. And as she finishes with finishing that walrus of a man, carrying the sake set down the hall and lilting her voice at the sliding door, wiling her way in, they're face to face at last. 

The anticipation in Akemi coils, glittering, seeing the cup lift to chapped lips, that sharp point of a chin, a flash of those eyes—so blue they're shocking; she didn't need to fake her earlier gasp. 

The cup pauses and is held maddeningly far from that mouth, then the samurai starts to tell a story, and the gloat of it... it's about Taigen, the blue-eyed freak is showing off about beating Taigen and killing him and oh, how she wishes the sleep draught was poison and says so, but even as Akemi is so roughly manhandled she can't help but think the gangly long lines, the narrowness of the boy aren't so inelegant anymore. Something about them in motion, even through bound and ballooned blue cloth, so irritatingly efficiently batting her aside and pinning her down, reminds her of an archer's bow, supple, the slopes, the ease and speed.  

It's so different from Taigen's broad and rawly physical body, wearing his strength on his sleeve. Wore, wears no more, because this onryo killed him, and she hates him. The samurai who cut through Shindo Dojo has killed Taigen and replaced him in every way. Even his scarf has been snatched and taken as a token, tied neatly around a slender neck, Akemi notices with a squeak. 

The stolen scarf hangs over her mockingly as she lets the news break her anger in a sob. Oh, Taigen. She's barely had the time to mourn before Mizu is rolling his eyes in disgust and rolling nimbly off of her. Taigen isn't dead, he's nowhere near, but there's been a contract drawn for new duel that surely means he won't stay gone for long. 

He'd held her down before by firm hands on her wrists, sitting straddled on her hips, forcing her still on her back. Akemi's skin had burned in indignation at his touch and she burns with it now, insenced, insulted, when he methodically and maddingly calmly binds her with rope scoured from some dark and depraved hall of this place. 

"I hate you," Akemi fumes at last. 

His eyebrows have drawn down again in a scowl, calligraphy stroke smooth and sharp. Smooth like far-off seaside birds. He leaves his bumbling apprentice to watch her with a kitchen knife and gloomily marches his way out. 

It's hours, time spent shifting fruitlessly in her bounds and with Ringo for company (and it's indicative of how stuck and bored she is that Akemi learns that and entertains his conversation), before Mizu is gloomily marching his way back in, heavier than before. The lines under his eyes seem carved deeper. 

Akemi takes a breath, and because her hands ache where they've been twisted to tied behind her, because her chest still burns with righteous anger, she goads him one more time. 

The sword shings loose. She gasps and squeezes her eyes shut, before the ropes fall in a circle like shorn hair, like shaken foliage from maple in the harvest months. 

It is indignation that flares in her, fiery and red-nailed like the autumn trees in the palace gardens, later. It leads her up from the cellar and out. Her father always had choice words to say about her disobedience, but in Akemi's mind at least she's always known when to pick her battles, when to talk back and when to sweeten her tongue. 

She knows she was right, right again to go against a man's words, when she creeps over and finds Mizu unconscious, surrounded by dead, dying bodies. 

Akemi shakes him, takes a small satisfaction in slapping him at first, slapping him again more worridely when he doesn't stir. His face is soft. Soft and cool as laquerware, free of any trace of facial hair and the roughness shaving left. 

Then she's desperate, as the last however many are left of the Thousand Claws start emerging again from the shadows, and Akemi shoots to her feet and back away, holding out her paring knife, refusing to tremble. The men leer and advance. She has time to curse Mizu one last time before his shape on the floor is suddenly gone. 

His blue blade appears first, like an omen, tearing and parting the men before her in red and parting for those eyes and that scowl. 

He holds out his hand. She takes it. The feel of his firm grip on her her's, being pulled along through twisting dark hallways perfumed with blood and lurking with danger, for once she's glad that she's being led on. Mizu leads her to safety. Well. Cuts a path and shoos her in the general direction, but the room is steadily filling with the rest of the Claws. And—and there's been no one else in Akemi's life, no one ever, who's protected her so wholly, without payment, without obligation, and they aren't even friends. 

And the way Mizu moves, it is most impressive. He fights like no man she'd seen, his blade slashing and searing and lashing like a monster itself, a snake that laces and coils and strikes in a blur, an arc of liquid in motion, his body lazing then snapping then crashing then reforming, like the water for which he was named—水. 

And at some point too in the frenzy, Akemi had started to think of him, call him by his name. You're not even special, she had said with scorn earlier, but nobody ordinary could have done this. No one man can fight an entire army and win; but a demon can, perhaps. 

Her heart beats quick and fevered in her throat, watching him. But Akemi isn't afraid. 

Chapter Text

The Thousand Claw army is defeated. The men her father sent for her will never return from their task. Mizu drops at their feet like a stone in sea, and Akemi is sharply reminded that no matter how fiercely he fights or how coldly he treats her or how eerily blue his eyes are, he's human. 

His skin's hot on his bloody hands, his face, where she pats furtively, flurryingly when he goes down and doesn't get back up. Ringo picks him up and carries him like a sack of rice, bustles back inside the brothel, leaving her to pick up the weapon left in the snow. Akemi follows. 

Akemi follows, because Mizu is the only person—man, monster, whatever—that's ever saved her like that. She doesn't need to like him to be grateful for what he's done. And in the halls and as they make their way back inside, the whispers and titters of the other girls tracking them, the business they deal in day in and day out, Akemi knows she can't stay here, never did plan on staying here. 

She's got what she wanted, what she came here for, anway. Or she will. 

They end up back in the private room they met in, the cut ropes still in one corner, the unfinished pot of tea long gone cold. 

As Ringo sets Mizu down and busies himself getting water, wetting a rag and laying it to his master's forehead, fussing with an attentiveness that she's only seen in Seki from her younger and illness-prone days, Akemi trails in and puts down the naganata (the hilt built out of weights that sat usually around Mizu's wrists and ankles, another irritatingly impressive feat) and kneels opposite to her unexpected companions. 

Mizu looks very pale under all that blood. Some of it has to be his, but just how much? 

Akemi bites her lip and smooths her hands down the front of her kimono. “Is there anything I can do?” 

“Master's getting a fever again. I'm out of herbs from last time, and he needs medicine. The marketplace isn't far.” 

Ringo stands, shouldering his bag, taking a moment to squint analyzingly at Akemi. She squints back. 

“You can keep watch,” he says, too soft to be commanding, but serious nonetheless. “Don't move him or try anything.” 

Akemi rolls her eyes. “Don't worry, I'm done dedicating myself to the insatiable courtesan act.” 

And then Akemi is alone with Mizu once more. She's worried, because he can't die. She needs him, because despite not finding Taigen here, she's found the one person who's going to get her what she wants. 

Mizu will draw Taigen back from wherever he is for their duel and then Taigen will win and Akemi will go back home and her father will finally allow them to be married again. It's easy, the most comprehensive plan she's had since leaving Kyoto. 

Except. Except the longer she turns it over in her mind like precious stones, the weaker it runs, faint like a night's dream becomes with every excitement of the next day, and the next. It's exactly what she wants and when she imagines it working out exactly like that, there's a strange uneasiness that slips in and nips at her contentment. 

Mizu gives a groan, tossing slightly like he's trying to fight in his dreams too. His long face pinches, sharpening the already sharp. 

Akemi shakes aside overthinking over her plan and the future and peels the wetted rag off Mizu's forehead, washing it in the bucket of cold water, wringing it, wiping at his clamminess. 

His breaths come shallow and strange. Akemi leans down closer and loosens Taigen's scarf where it's tied snug around his neck. His breathing doesn't get noticbly easier, but it gives her piece of mind that there's no chance of death by scarf strangulation. 

In the folds of her clothing is the paring knife, which she finally washes clean. She stashes it back and tucks Taigen's scarf, that smells like Mizu now, away too. 

Ringo hasn't returned so Akemi sits back on her heels and watches the samurai sleep. It's unfitful, half-waking, like the unconsciousness he had slipped into back when the Claws still stalked these halls, when Akemi went back to find him on the floor and had to slap and pray him awake. 

His uncovered neck is bruising. He mutters something and tosses again, mouth open slightly in strained breath. His neck is slim, discoloring but smooth, no bump or bob at the throat. 

Mizu is glowering in his sleep too, though it's probably the pain from the injuries he's hidden twisting his face. It makes Akemi frown, how delicate the bones in his cheek look, the curve of his jaw, the imperfected line of his neck. 

She reaches out and ever so lightly touches the tips of her fingers to the darkening marks of hands on his throat. 

Those eyes snap open. Blue eyes like an onryo, like the shell of the sky on a starless day, like the sea struck by sunlight. Vibrant as jade and hard as steel. Even right now, when they're fighting to stay open, they're striking. 

Akemi gasps. There's an iron grip on her hand, though it wavers as Mizu tries to sit up, teeth gritted. 

“What are you doing?” 

His voice is gravelly, more guttural than before, and he's trying not to wheeze. It feels threatening all the same. 

“You're awake!” Akemi tries a laugh, extracting her hand from Mizu's wavering grip. “And your neck is purpling... it looks painful?” 

“Among other things.” Mizu sighs. “I'm awake. Don't prod me again.” 

“Sure.” 

It's not an awkward silence because Akemi doesn't do awkward silences, but Mizu gives her one last stiff look before closing her eyes again. She tells him Ringo is out to procure medicinal herbs. That and everything else she tries to talk about gets a grunt in return. Maybe a hmm if Akemi's lucky. 

She'd be less offended by Mizu's apparent boredom of her if he was back to passing out from mysterious injury, not startling Akemi with sudden strength, snatching her wrist at the lightest touch. 

A small bell tolls happily down the hall and Ringo reappears, supplies tucked under a handless arm. Mizu cracks his eyes open briefly in acknowledgement and Ringo gets back to fussing, laying out plants to grind into paste or boil into soup, needle and thread and bandages for stitching. 

He talks as he readies his apprentice-playing-healer things, and Akemi is glad for it. How does Ringo stand Mizu's brooding silence? He's unterred, certainly warm enough with Akemi, promising he'll make them each a hot bowl of soba soup with the dried buckwheat noodles he also bought earlier from a vendor on the way back that's why it took so long, sorry, like they're all friends, looking forward to the meal they'll share. 

And then everything's ready, and things gets weird. Weirder in an objective way, because with all that's happened since Akemi met Mizu in this brothel room last night, convincing Ringo to let her stay and help with playing healer—letting her stay to see too where Mizu's actually injured—letting her to stay in the room at all ends up being the biggest battle yet. 

“I can sew,” she says. “Of course I always preferred literature and the arts, but I've a good hand and eye.” 

Maybe she does sound pentualant, but Akemi's not the one being unreasonable here. She's never been one to be easily dismissed, despite her father's best efforts. 

“I fail to see how an extra pair of hands doesn't aid the situation.” 

Ringo makes a wheedling noise. “Well, it's just... us boys doing surgery. Just us two guys, with nothing to hide. Except for injuries.” 

Mizu says nothing, probably because of the horrible wound he's been hiding. 

Akemi takes a closer look at the rest of him, clothes so bloody it's kind of frightening; now she notices where it blooms darker and wetter than the rest, to the cloth at the side of his stomach. 

Her entire day since coming here has been emotional and bloody and frightening, and Akemi can't have Mizu die on her, kami willing. She shakes her head resolutely at Ringo's funny song and dance. 

“We need to strip him to see where he's hurt. Come on. I don't even like him, actually I kind of hate him, so it's not weird.” 

Ringo blanches. “Oh, no no...” 

Akemi can feel her face getting hot with irritated indignation. “Well, he's not going to tell us nicely where, is he!” 

“I'm right here,” Mizu mutters, eyes still closed. 

It's ridiculous. He's hurt and refusing the help she's kindly offered for the good of them all and he's undoubtedly in pain and that much blood out of the body is definitely a problem, and how can he be in condition to duel her future husband if he's anemic and mortally wounded—

“Akemi,” Mizu says. 

She presses her lips together. “Yes?”

“I don't trust you.” Those blue eyes slide over her and then back. “And I don't think you're right. About anything.” 

“Just—” He stops and takes a slow, weary few breaths. “You'd better be good. At stitching.” 

Perhaps Mizu is more dramatic of a personality than Akemi originally thought. Ringo lets out a breath and turns his focus on his pot of herbs and plants for healing soup. Mizu's funny breathing goes a bit more funny as Akemi leans in and works off his shirt. 

He doesn't look her in the eye, almost like he's shy even at this point, and reassures her raspily there's nothing that needs attention on his legs or anything. 

“Alright,” Akemi says. “Pants stay on during.” 

Hanten unpeeled, Akemi zeroes in on the blood trying to crust around a cut on the shoulder. It's not too deep, just new, and could only be from the blades of the men her father sent for her, Akemi realizes. There's the more problem blood pooling one, a line of four holes from those nasty claw weapons. As Mizu's torso shudders in breath it spills a small fresh tide of blood. 

But that's not all. There's bandages already bound high on Mizu's chest, clean by the looks of them, and Akemi only has time to be incensed he's hiding another injury before she realizes. The bandages are hiding something. There's the slightest swell of the chest under them. 

And the slender hands and delicate details and strange beauty that make up this swordsman who did what no man could, took on an entire army and won, suddenly make sense. 

It's impressive, she thinks, if Mizu wasn't impressive before, and a part of the hate hot resentment she's held for the unnamed samurai who tore up Shindo Dojo and tore up a promised taproot in her life and had the nerve to judge her for not going along giggling with who her father sold her off to fades. She'd been furious before. How could a man understand that women in their world had no choice? But she'd been wrong. 

“Well,” Akemi says. 

“Well, I'll keep my pretty mouth shut,” Mizu says, slow. 

“I'll keep your promise, of course,” Akemi offers back, sweetly. 

She knows she shouldn't, but Akemi can't help but thrill at this secret, and to think that everything's gotten so much more exciting now, knowing what she knows. 

Chapter Text

Ironically enough, ceding to Akemi and her strange insistence to help does make Mizu feel somewhat stripped bare. This time she's not even fully bared, bandages still bound across her chest, and hurt enough and feeling horrible enough to not be too mindful of it, but still. 

This time, she's not fully vulnerable, without a slip of cover except for her sword. But Ringo's proved his use since then. Akemi hasn't. 

At least the princess doesn't stare, or let herself be bothered by the blood, the cloying metallic heavy-in-the-nose scent of it, the tear and vivid red wrongness of injury. 

Getting used to it enough to be carelessness didn't come easy to Mizu, not that she'd admit it. Akemi is surprisingly effecient for someone who's clearly never had to tend to, or even really see anything like this. Or she at least acts sure enough to give the illusion of being helpful. 

Akemi is also not so suprisingly effecient at useless conversation. She keeps up the questions as she cleans the blood, dirtying a growing number of cleaning rags. 

Does that hurt worse than before? How bad is it on a scale of ichi to ju?

Mm.

A nail taps at the healed over but crusty purpled line down the middle of her left shoulder, between arm and breast.

Where did you get this? It's old enough to be all scabby, but—

Your fiancé. Wasn't so totally useless. In that duel, I mean. Dunno about everywhere else.

Oh...

Is this supposed to still bleed? It doesn't seem to want to stop.

More prodding. Makes Mizu wish Ringo were here instead, but he was in the room with an irori, a fireplace in the floor, cooking up foul medicinal soups (gross, but admittedly very effective). 

The four little holes from the Claws' claw is still spilling. Akemi wipes at it again and Mizu cranes her neck to get a look at it and barely clamps her jaw shut in time to stop a pained noise from escaping. Maple-fingered flames are washing over her skin and licking with teeth into her flesh, surely. 

The cloth pressed to it has gone dark and sopped near black with her lifeblood. The last time she was stabbed like this...

The bridge and the garden and the world dazzled in rainbow light. Fire in her gut, her stomach, eating and bleeding and burning. Sweat ice cold fear frozen down her spine, on her brow. It didn't matter if she clawed at the clothes of passersby and gouged her horror and desperation into their skin, none of them batted an eye at the half-breed crawling, calling, for help, for mercy, back to begging for scraps. Compassion was no easier to beg for than food. Courtesans on a bridge down by an opium supplier. Mama. Like a dream. Mama? Mizu thought she had to have been dying. It wasn't bad. It wasn't so bad. It wasn't. 

“Mizu. Mizu!” Someone shakes her and her stomach sears in spitting pain, and she's awake again. 

Mizu whimpers through her teeth. There's blood on her tongue now too. 

“Okay. Alright. I'm going to sew up your shoulder gash now, okay?” Akemi sounds a few touches more unsure, sounds just a touch away from a waver. Her nice forehead is all creased in worry. That unsurety definitely doesn't make Mizu worry too. 

Part of her wants to curl up once again and let herself sleep, for a good long while. But she can't. She's not finished. There are still three men she has to kill. 

“Pardon?” Akemi's dainty brow has yet to uncrease. 

“Mm?”

“You're mumbling. Are you delarious? Is the delarium setting in?” 

Mizu licks her lips and swallows and tries to talk normal. “No. I need to shut the cuts. Stop the bleeding.” 

Akemi takes a sighing breath. “Okay.”

The cut Mizu didn't notice before, from the Kyoto men on horseback, is slashed across the outside of her left shoulder. It's not so deep or so long. The end of one end of it just about meets the purpled scab of Taigen's cut, in a cross that doesn't cross. 

It's clear it's the first time Akemi's done this, on flesh, on skin, and not the threads on silk and cloth that girls must do. 

She readies the needle expertly enough. It dips into Mizu's skin too shallowly and drags nastily across flesh. 

Akemi winces and pinches her lips and Mizu chews at the inside of her cheek. 

Akemi's very neat, but too slow and careful after the first miss-stab, but as she goes she gets more sure and settles into a measured, steady running stitch. She's also so focused she stops talking. 

The needle slips in and out more smoothly and surely. Mizu lets her neck relax and lies back completely. The repetition of the small pricks makes her drowsy again. Blinking, she forces her eyes open, watching Akemi kneeling close from this prone angle. 

“Thank you,” Mizu says, quiet. 

The princess looks up, pausing her needlework, still frowning, but not with anger. At least it seems less a look of derision. 

“For going back. Waking me up back there, protecting the cellar.” 

The needle makes another careful loop. “Well... it was the right thing to do.” 

Mizu tries a nod, then thinks better of it with a grimace. “Consider that debt paid today.”

“Debt?” Akemi's frown is all confusion now. Then it draws down into something tighter again. “Oh. Of course. Stopping my father's men to repay a favor. Of course.” 

That hadn't been how it happened in the moment, she was so out of it exhausted she still doesn't really know why she did and that's strange, but framing it like this makes much more sense. Mizu's not in this to help people. Favor for a favor is easier, simpler. Keeps things making sense. 

Akemi's last few stitches are more brusque, but maybe she's just glad to be done with it. Her exhale is heavy through the nose in a purposeful way. 

“You can still go back,” Mizu says, as the thread is tied off and cut. “I'm not on this path to collect people. There's no shame in taking the ordained but easy life.” 

Bandages get bound around her shoulder wordlessly. Mizu feels her eyes flutter and shifts her shoulders just enough to ache. The effort to talk and think with politeness and tact is taking it out of her, but she can't fade out again. There's still the big bleeder. 

Akemi touches the small, neatly lined wounds with a cool palm. Mizu's abdomen trembles. It hurts but the fire is everywhere; her body is a furnace, that's blood letting like water sloshing from sea to sea. The dark snuff of sleepiness creeps up on her in waves. 

A newly threaded needle works at one end of the claw holes and slips. Akemi curses and wipes at the red with the red rag and tries again. 

Mizu bites the inside of her cheek and makes her throat work and forces herself to talk, not because she wants to, but if she doesn't focus on something other than this she's sacred she'll do something horrible, like weep. Or slip off to sleep and never wake up. 

“Good work with that knife. Before. Many men would've struck less true.” 

Many men—greater men—have feared her, scorned her, called her a monster for far less. It makes her think of Mikio but she doesn't think about him, so it doesn't make her think about anything, really. At any rate killing is never pleasant work, not for the soft hearted. It never comes easy. But having a strength in your feet where you stand, a strength in your back that keeps you standing, even in the face of bloodshed—

Quietly, Mizu's impressed by the way Akemi didn't scream or cower or run from the morning's violence like the other girls might've. But she isn't a girl, of course. She's a princess. And Mizu has never met a princess before, but she thinks that usually they aren't so... full of fight. 

Akemi stews in blessed silence for a beat longer. Then, quiet as it is full of weight, “It's the first time I've ever taken a life. And the second.” 

“I can tell.” 

Akemi narrowed her eyes. Mizu has the strange urge to laugh at how scrunched her nose gets when she's offended. 

“Keep the paring knife,” Mizu offers in consolation, feeling her mouth quirk up. “You wield it well. Fiercely. With honor.” 

Akemi laughs. It's a short sound, slightly high, more of a snort, but so out of place among the violence the walls of this brothel have borne witness to, the drying and undrying akai that have painted the princess like pigments. 

Mizu's maybe out of it enough to not notice that she stares up at her. Akemi clears her throat and turns her head away. 

“That four-holed thing is still a problem,” she tells the wall. 

“Yes.” 

The shoji slide open, and Akemi jumps slightly, getting to her feet and smoothing at her irreversibly creased kimono, clasping her hands in front of her. 

Ringo looks inquisitively between her and Mizu on the floor. “What'd I miss?” 

“Nothing. I took care of the bleeding arm, but there's still the, ah, four holes.” 

Ringo sets down a tray, balanced with several steaming bowls, soups of medicine curling smoke fouly up, others that don't prick the nose and turn the stomach, and they get to planning together. 

First it's decided Mizu should take the medicine. Both Ringo and Akemi agree on this, irritatingly. 

Sitting up enough to drink is a little bit agonizing, but Ringo helps her sit and lets her lean on him and Akemi helps hold the bowls and she doesn't have the strength now to object. 

It's slow going. Her stomach feels knotted and unsure about ingesting anything. Water goes down easier, and she drinks greedily from her canteen that Ringo also took the time to refill, not even realizing how thirsty is, sputtering a bit in haste. 

Most of the soup goes down too, between heaving a bit, drinking in sips and starts. 

Second, what to do with the claw wound. 

“Sewing its not working and it won't stop,” Akemi sighs. 

Mizu blinks another long blink. They're going in circles. “We need to close it.” 

“Master,” Ringo says. “If needle and thread aren't working...” 

“That hearth. The irori,” Mizu mutters. 

Ringo nods. “Yes, the tea rooms. It's heated charcoal but a fire can be kept to cook, for later. But your injury—” 

“We need to burn it. Stop the bleeding that way.” 

Akemi gives her an incredulous look. “Is that even possible?” 

Mizu shakes her head. “I was raised a swordsmith's apprentice.” 

“Yes, and that's with steel, not... skin and flesh?” 

“Mm.” It'll feel awful. But it's the only thing she can think of working at this point. 

Her hanten is splattered with dried blood and cut in places, but Mizu drapes it back on for cover, Ringo and Akemi half carrying her between them. 

A soft-spoken courtesan with a mop passes them in the hall, pausing wide-eyed. “Do you... need any help?” 

“We're fine,” Akemi smiles. “Is the fireplace in there ready?” 

“Yeah, I'll get you some more firewood.” 

The girl darts off before anyone can object. In the nearest tea room, propped by the pit of the irori, Mizu instructs Ringo to find a suitable piece of metal to use to cauterize the claw wound. 

The courtesan comes back with kindling, kneeling close to stoke the low fire. 

“Thank you, Yuki.” Akemi takes the poker and returns the discarded mop. Yuki bows in thanks and leaves. 

For metal, there's the metal poker for the fire, but it's too thin and pointy to work for all four holes in a line. They need something flat and long enough. 

Mizu makes up her mind. “Akemi? You have the knife?” 

She does. The flat of the blade is a good width and length. Heating it in the fire until it's hot enough not to hammer, but just begin to glow. They wait. When it's ready, Ringo holds Mizu down by the shoulders wincing apologies but she just twitches and then goes uneasily still. She's sweating on top of old sweat. 

Akemi holds her knife, wrapped with cloth at the grip, and looks more frightened than she did hours ago, the place still overrun by clawed men. 

“Do it,” Mizu says. “Please.” 

The red hot knife wavers and lowers and nears. The heat grows like a breath blown on her skin. Her gut roils. The heat gets worse and worse and splits and whitens and shrieks and smokes. 

Mizu screams. 

When she sleeps she dreams she's on fire. 

Passing out again is preferable to smelling the burning of her own flesh, and the danger of struggling against the flat of the knife and accidentally cutting herself deeper. 

She dreams she's being burned alive, just like her mama, and when she wakes it's with dread in her throat, panting hoping she didn't make too much noise while unconscious. 

It hurts all over, heavier than before, but clearer from it. When Mizu sits up, slow and shaky and leaning on her better right arm, it's not as bad as before. There's clean bandages around her stomach. 

The claw wound throbs dully, but it's not bleeding anymore, wrestled closed like furnace doors. Soon the new skin will be itching, angry and insistent as it pushes through as it heals. 

Ringo is at her side, offering up her canteen and a reassuring smile. “It worked.” 

They're back in the private room. There's two futons added on the floor, the third one rumpled and left unattended. 

Chapter Text

Akemi leaves as soon as the knife seals skin enough that it starts to smell. 

Out the sliding door, down the hall, through the winding corridors, past pink stains of scrubbed at and cleaned at blood, back into the room the courtesans used to dress for—that she carefully put together a look for Mizu in, decorative plant pieces in her hair, white oshiroi powder on her face, beni under eyes, red painted on her lips, pretty crimson black kimono layered and tied and fastened. 

It's all ruined now. The outfit and the notion she walked in that room with, hope and hot sake in hand. 

Akemi isn't worried and she definitely isn't intensely relieved, she tells herself over and over, as she lets out a breath (one she's been fully aware she was holding, since Mizu collapsed for the first time this morning, in front of the brothel steps) as soon as it's all over. 

Mizu is out cold again, in an okay way this time. Probably. Hopefully. Yuki checked back in on them at the screaming and cautiously asked if everything was alright, which it was, thank you very much, and brought them extra futons and extra bedding. 

Akemi sat and settled into hers and tried to rest. Surely she was exhausted enough after the thorough excitement of the day, but still she found herself restless. 

Ringo knelt on his, set on the other side of sleeping Mizu. He would stay to watch over her and reassured Akemi it was fine, as if she needed that reassurance. She nodded absently, kept herself steady, kept her slow cooling knife gripped in her hand and calmly made her leave. 

It's almost like the swordsman is trying to get herself killed on purpose. Before Akemi's husband can do it first. 

There's a fresh basin of water in the changing rooms and she washes her face, pinking the cloth, before she realizes her hands are filthy with someone else's blood too. She grimaces and gets to scrubbing it from her fingers, from under her nails, from where, for some reason, it's gotten all the way up her arms in splatters and smears. 

Her knife is still radiating an uncomfortable warmth, so she sets in in the water, leaving it to quietly hiss and cool completely. Then she wipes it clean and sets it aside to tuck into her clothes when she's dressed. 

Akemi steps behind a screen and gets changed, again. Discarding the kimono layer by layer, plucking the branchy things out of her hair, it's methodical enough to help her feel clean. The blood she's washed off, but somehow this step by step action is more cleansing. 

Chosing what to wear next is another weirdly calming action. Before it was always her attendants that laid out what to wear, at times at the instruction of her father. 

That had been more common lately, with the many awful men her father had taken to parading and presenting her to. The kimonos she had been made to wear were beautiful, the colors rich and the patterns intricate, the cloth fine, the cut perfect, the many layers exhaustive to wear and remove, the best new designs in the country. 

The clothes here are common, of course, by comparison. But Akemi takes a small joy in that anyway. She choses a red kimono because red is one of her favorite colors, and it suits her. 

There sits a small polished metal mirror on the wallside table. Akemi doesn't paint herself with makeup again. She lets her hair down and combs it, reties it in the usual style. 

The face that stares back at her is the exact same as it was yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday; just more tired from travel. Akemi sighs and smooths her hand across her skin. All the poor conditions she's been subject to are going to give her eyebags. But that aside she looks disturbingly the same as before she set out on this increasingly wild goose chase. 

There's no knock before the shoji whisper open, but she's not so lost in thought that it startles her; nor is the voice that greets her entirely surprising. 

“Princess Akemi.” 

Madame Kaji's severe face is tired and almost wry, now. She's as elegant as ever, oddly regal in a way that made Akemi feel childish and foolish from the start, but her shrewdness is less sharp in the low candlelight of the room. This day has worn down on them all. 

“Yes. I guess there's no hiding it now.” 

Akemi steps away from the mirror and offers a smile. When she first set foot in here the other girls laughed outright at the royal act. 

“The daughter of a lord, run all this way to my brothel. And still you stay, even now,” Madame Kaji says. She gestures a hand. “The blood never spilled far enough to disturb my own quarters. Perhaps you'll join me for tea? For talk of business. And out of a latent courtesy, princess.” 

It's easy to nod. The restless need to wander hasn't left yet. “Thank you. I think I will.” 

Akemi follows the taller woman's smooth, graceful steps and tries not to seem like she's hurrying by her ankles. 

The halls have been mostly spared blood down this way. At the end of it, the sliding doors open to two conjoined rooms, the closest with a low table set over the irori, a steaming pot of tea being prepared by one of the girls, who the madame dismisses with a nod of thanks. 

The hearth is hot and warms her down to her fingers where the other rooms were uncomfortably cool, but that licking heat brings to mind the recent unwelcome discovery of what burning flesh smells like when it starts to cook. 

Akemi swallows it down and watches the tea pour in a silk scarf stream and accepts the cup with as much etiquette as her old palace lessons taught her. 

“So, even now you stay. Far from your comfortable home, I imagine. Though I also imagine you had your reasons for running away.” A perfect brow raises. 

“Perhaps the gentleman is not so unwavering in the matters of the heart? Perhaps you've fallen in love and have decided to take flight with him to whichever corner of hell he walks for next.” 

Matters of the heart. Love. Laughably, none of that is the currency in which Madame Kaji and her girls deal in. More aptly, to survive and survive well, they do what they have to do. Unpleasant things. Like tricking stupidly brave or bravely stupid samurai of incredible skill into keeping her around, until they get Akemi what she wants, by facing their final fight. 

“Mizu?” Akemi gives a tiny scoff. It's not as spiteful a sound, as scornful a feeling at the thought of her as she'd hope. She hates that the sure and sharp hatred that Mizu associated has softened. She's just tired enough to not think too much over how and when that happened. 

Madame Kaji saw through her bluff of renowned courtesan Akemi, but she hardly pressed the lie, but she gives an analyzing look over the rim of her cup as she drinks. 

She's been kind in her own way. Her hospitality extends even now, and so long as Akemi stays, Madame Kaji's house will not give her up to any men looking for her. Though Akemi probably owes that to Mizu and what she's done, too. 

“I'm sure it's quite the story you've got to share.” 

Akemi takes a sip, washes the back-of-the-teeth bitter taste of unsweetened tea down. 

“It isn't really,” she says, shaking her head. “My father has his ideas about who he wishes me wed off to, like a fine china set. The suitors began to feel more and more like auctioneers.” 

She stares at the crumbs of tea leaves settled in the bottom of the cup. “But this time it was set. He'd sold me off to the Shogun's son, all for his own political gain. For the good of the clan.”

The words flow easy, and Akemi blinks against a sudden heat in her eyes as she realizes that for the first time, someone who understands that horrible powerlessness is listening. 

Seki was understanding only until he couldn't be. Mizu is a woman, yes, but free in the disguise he's built. 

Madame Kaji is a good listener. She was also wedded once, much to Akemi's surprise, as a girl. After lasting a year into an arranged marriage to a drunkard thrice her age, she spiked his sake, walked for to the next village with nothing but her former husband's coin purse, rid the black from her teeth, and began making a living as a courtesan. 

“Bad men—bad marriages—are like weeds.” So concludes the story. “Entirely common, and entirely difficult to get rid of.” 

Akemi tries to keep the hope out of her voice. “Is it foolish to want a good marriage? That there are men who are great, and are handsome and meet that in character, and that are almost undefeated in swordsmanship, and... honorable?” 

“You're asking me if I know such a man?” Madame Kaji looks very close to open mirth now. 

“You don't know him, but I do. I left Kyoto in search of Taigen.” Akemi sighs. “I was meant to marry him. I wanted to marry him—want to. I will. My father had agreed, but the Shogunate offered a more attractive deal.” 

The hot tea has gone warm in her cup. She sups the last of it. 

“What I want, most of all, is to not be sold off to a stranger, to be able to chose for myself who to wed. To marry for love. If not amicability.” 

Madame Kaji's smile is a slight but amused thing. 

“And now you've found a way out of your arranged marriage. And now you've not found your... ideal husband.” 

“I'm working on it,” Akemi mutters. 

Madame Kaji hums. “You're going to follow that crazy man with a death wish, aren't you?” 

“Mizu's an idiot. But...” 

And so on. Their cups are refilled. Akemi's contract, ink still fresh in Madame Kaji's employ, is nullified if she wishes, and she does wish, thank you very much. 

Madame Kaji savors the last heat of the tea and lets her go, stands to walk her to the hall. 

“One last thing, on the subject of the gentleman. I trust you and his apprentice have tended to his injury?” 

“He'll be fine,” Akemi says, nods, and finally believes it herself. 

“Good. It would be most unfortunate if he succumbed now, under this roof. Not only was what he did for us unrequitable, quite a few of the girls have taken a liking to him, hm?” 

“Well,” Akemi says. “I'll have to let him know. He'll be thrilled.” 

Chapter Text

The princess makes her return at some undescernible hour after Mizu wakes, with the blood and the makeup wiped clean from her face. Akemi looks better without it. Finer and softer. Younger, though she must be around the same age as Mizu herself. 

It's turning to night again. In the evening while she was still asleep, Yuki and a few other of the girls came in to see them again, but they didn't want anything and they didn't do anything. 

“Don't worry, master, they just watched you sleep,” Ringo summarizes. 

How normal and nice of them. 

Mizu has it in her now to be awake and stay awake, so she has it in her to know that they've stayed in this one place for too long. The lack of action itches away at her. Or maybe it's just the healing, slow-scabbing wounds that are itchy. 

They need to get moving again soon, now that Mizu is clear headed enough to remember that she has what she came for, the map tucked back in her clothes intact, just bloodied a bit at the corner. 

Especially with the new company that's decided to stay. Akemi will undoubtedly have to hide from whoever her father has sent next, and it's another contingency to consider. 

“We've already stayed in this place too long,” Mizu says. “We set out late tonight.” 

Akemi makes a frustrated noise deep in her thoat. “For kami's sake, why are you so—” 

“So what?” Mizu's voice isn't as strong and her gaze isn't as sharp as she'd like it to be, but she puts what strength she has back into it. 

“Reticent. Obtuse. Stubborn enough to scare a horse,” Akemi mutters. Louder, she says, “All I mean is that you're in no condition to travel yet. Or even stand up.” 

Mizu grits her teeth. “I'm more than capable—” 

Ringo pushes down at her shoulders with a yelp. “Don't sit up! Don't even think about it.” 

“Tch. I'm not going to reopen anything.” 

Still, she lets herself be pushed back down with a hiss. Kintsugi cracks of hurt flare up across the just beginning to heal skin, electric, searing her shoulder, her stomach, tapering slowly back down to a manageable level the longer she lays unmoving and breathes. 

Mizu sighs and tries again. She's never been one with words, never learned to master the delicacy and diplomacy of them, like the way she has with weapons. 

“In case you've forgotten, Princess, there will still be men looking to you drag you home.” 

“Yes, and while in this brothel, this neighborhood, nobody will give me up after what you've done for the place, getting rid of Himata and his army,” Akemi says. 

She shakes her head. “It's safe here, if only you can be convinced to take more time to recuperate.” 

Ringo gives an unhelpful nod. 

They've been stuck in this seedy corner of Mihonoseki long enough. Mizu searches for a deal to appease both the people on either side of her, and her aching everything that could use an additional day's rest. 

“Three days,” she settles on. “That's all the time I need to rest. Tomorrow is the third and final.” 

“The same time you took when you were cut open by the assassin on the beach,” Ringo nods. “Your fever went down, you were nearly good as new...” 

He gives Akemi an unsure look. “But by the third day you knocked Taigen out and we left him, instead of facing him in that re-duel, which he has that contract for... I'm sure he'll be back. For his friendly fight to the death.” 

Akemi doesn't return his hopeful smile. 

“Three days. That's all I need,” Mizu repeats. Akemi still looks displeased, so to show her how lax she's being, how easy she's been with ceding on this, Mizu admits, “When I got stabbed the first time I let myself be bedridden for a week. But that was different.” 

“Wait, how many times have you been stabbed?” Akemi looks alarmed. 

“Should I have been counting?” 

Akemi rolls her eyes. “Alright. We stay for one more day before running off, and you spend that time resting. In bed. Don't make me tie you down.” 

“That won't be necessary,” Mizu says, stiff. 

She catches Akemi's shoulder shake with the threat of laughter. Her face turns down to regard Mizu, a pretty smile on her mouth. “It's a last resort, okay? Relax.” 

“Hm. Ha ha.”

They settle in for their second night there. From her earlier wanderings in the brothel, Akemi has brought books with her—a romance novel or two, surprisingly not singularly erotica, borrowed from one of the girls with a not so secret soft spot for this sort of literature. 

Mizu watches Akemi while she's rearranged herself in a comfortable position on her futon, knees folded, focused on the pages. Beside her and up this close, Akemi's eyelashes are very long. She brings a hand to her face and leans on it as she reads. 

Mizu thinks that somewhere in all this, somewhere between stepping between Lord Daichi's men and keeling over in the snow and letting Akemi discover her secret and touch her hands to her bare skin and press against the deepest bleeding parts of her, she's passed some invisible town sentry gate. 

The land from here is foreign and strange and confusing. A part of her hates that uncertainty; how long ago was it that she walked alone, through snow and ice-studded trees, the wind, whistling, tearing with its tiny knives, billowing at her back and pushing her on, her only companion? 

She thinks, a biting, instinctive part of her, that she should tell Akemi to leave and find her freedom elsewhere, Akemi who won't find whatever it is she seeks at Mizu's side. Akemi won't be happier here than in whatever beautiful, sprawling palace the Shogun's son lives in with his family in Edo. 

She's got no time for this, she thinks, not for friends or apprentices or love or companionship or rest, beyond the necessary, enough to be crawling back to her feet, functional, keeping on. 

But her wounds ache, and better than they would have otherwise, taken care of by herself. 

Mizu slips asleep, warm under heavy covers, to the quiet turn of pages, Akemi's occasional murmur at what she's reading, the humming of Ringo absorbed in a task, the soft slosh of water in a bucket as he washes at the blood off her clothes for her. 

Sometime later, a sweet smelling shadow nudges Mizu out of a dreamless sleep. Ringo is snoring quietly on her other side, and someone has lit a new candle, a lick of orange, catching in the river stone dark of Akemi's eyes. 

“Everyone ate earlier but I wasn't hungry so I didn't, but now I'm famished,” she whispers, in apparent explanation. 

Mizu frowns, rubbing her forehead at the heaviness in her skull. 

Now that she feels less horrible, she can notice the tightness of hunger at her stomach, a reminder she hasn't had anything all day. 

It's not so bad and it's an ignorable discomfort, but Akemi's leaned in conspiratorialy, excitment curving on her face in the still, half darkness of early morning. It makes her look even younger. Mizu is struck by a strange thought of what Akemi would've been like as a child. Then she shakes that funny thought. She'd probably have been even more of a brat. 

Mizu nods. Akemi takes that as invitation to shift closer and help her sit up. Mizu winces as she does, but the dizziness fades after a few breaths and Akemi is getting good at half holding her up, half being leaned on. 

She's very warm through her clothes. Out of some sort of drowsy delayed reaction, Mizu tenses, remembering her hanten is still off hanging to dry somewhere. Akemi's new kimono is of a rougher cloth than the last against her skin, every time shifts. 

“Come on, don't make me feed you.” Akemi offers the unwrapped in her hands. 

Mizu forgoes the offered chopsticks and eats. The rice and sashimi is better than anything she's eaten since Ringo's noodles, but it's probably just how suddenly hungry she is. 

Akemi has more grace, reaching out with the utensils, eating quickly but daintily. After she's had her fill, she slows and finishes chewing with a hand at her mouth, considering Mizu. 

“Why were you here?” Akemi asks. “Taigen mentioned you were after Heiji Shindo. Is he the man you're trying to kill?” 

A mouth full of salmon and rice makes it hard to talk seriously, but Mizu tries her best. 

“At the time of my birth, twenty years ago, there were four white men in all of Japan. One of them took my mother and made of me a monster. I will find and kill them all, or die failing it. I have vowed this. It is my life's worth.” 

Akemi watches her, quiet, orange lit like the gold gild on expensive wood. Her eyes are so darkly, deeply brown. In the low light they look like earth, streaked with flame. A swordsmith's furnace. 

“You really are crazy,” she says, softly. 

Mizu grunts. “Heiji Shindo is hiding a white devil, on an island just beyond Mihonoseki. Tomorrow night, Abijah Fowler dies.” 

“Or the next night after that,” she amends, at Akemi's look. “Soon.” 

It's a promise. 

“So you're on a revenge quest,” the princess says. “And what will you do after you've killed them all?” 

After? What will she have to do with herself after she's done it? What will she have to wake up every morning and train for every night? There will be nothing then. 

Mizu scowls. 

“And what will you do after Taigen comes crawling back to challenge me, and loses more than his honor and his hair?”

Akemi seems taken aback, and for a moment Mizu thinks she's going to red in the face and do the verbal equivalent of lunging at her, to fight for a stupid reason about a stupid thing, before she huffs a breath, letting her eyes close for a beat. 

“You're an asshole. And we'll see, when the day comes.” 

Akemi pulls a cloth bundle from her kimono. Pastries, she explains, from the sweet shop down the market square. Inside are two crumbly round circles. 

She offers one to Mizu, who just shakes her head. Never in her life has she had the luxury of enjoying something sweet. 

Akemi nibbles at her treat. She must have a fondness for sweet things. That makes sense, somehow. 

She doesn't let matters rest. That also makes sense. 

“You never answered me before, when I asked about Taigen. You knew each other as children?” 

“Mm. He had a name for me, you know. A dog, that begged for scraps.” 

Akemi frowns. 

“It's funny,” Mizu says, humorless, tone flat, “Now it's the both of you who come running after me like hounds.” 

Akemi's lips press together in a plush pink line. 

“He tried to chase me off a cliff, once. Told me to jump. Said it'd be for the better.” Mizu shrugs. “Not the first time he's tried to kill me.” 

She waits for a gasp, an incensed bullshit argument about how she's wrong, for the other woman to be finally scared off, but instead Akemi softens. Not pity. Not disgust. She looks Mizu in her eyes and tells a story of her own in exchange. 

“Growing up, in my father's palace in Kyoto, I had no children my age to play with. Only visiting nobles, who would sometimes bring with them their heirs. And those boys were stuck up in their positions as next in line lords. They were cruel and precious to their fathers in a way daughters are not. 

“I had to be careful in the way I retaliated. But there was a joy in the cunning of it all the same. Once I stuck a scorpion down the back of a shirt...” 

Akemi talks and Mizu listens. Ringo snores on quietly and steadily. Child Akemi seems suddenly less of an insufferable brat, and instead someone Mizu would've liked to have known—for her intensity, for her spirit. She would've been the kind of child who'd have fought back against the village bullies instead of just running. 

Akemi offers the last pastry and Mizu hesitates, but takes it this time. It's awful. The overpowering, cloying taste and the flake of it nearly make her choke, but Akemi smiles as she eats it, satisfied maybe, bites her lip in a bid to not laugh as Mizu cracks with an unadulterated look of disgust. 

When she sleeps, it's with sweetness on her tongue, on her teeth. 

Chapter Text

In the light of day, Mizu looks worse for wear, but also worn in a way that suggests recovery. 

In the morning Akemi wakes with a crick in her neck and laid curled up on her side, opening her eyes to a nose nearly touching close view Mizu's bandaged shoulder. 

The samurai is brooding even in dreams. Everything about Mizu is sharp, even when normal people would be smoothed and slackened by sleep. Even resting she doesn't look at rest, but at least now her sleep isn't so pained and fitful. 

Those lines, the darker skin under her eyes, are still there. How long of a sleep—how long of a time in which she be convinced to stay put and rest—before they get the chance to fade? 

Mizu wakes next around noon to drink and eat and, awkwardly, piss, which takes some maneuvering (Mizu on Akemi's arm, shaky and silent but mostly able to walk) outside to a small garden inside the back of the brothel premises. 

The open air is cold in her nose. There's the lightest touch of snowfall, the sky churned bean curd white overhead, tiny flecks of ice drifting to land in Akemi's lashes, her hair, on her nose, as she turns away to give some semblance of privacy. Then they shuffle their way back, arm in arm. 

Mostly Mizu dozes a lot and tries to stay out of nightmares. 

When she is awake, Akemi helps her sit up so she can down the newly boiled medical soup, and checks the shoulder cut, which hasn't reopened and is starting to scab up nicely, redresses it and rewraps new bandages. The burned shut wound on her stomach is smeared with a fresh coat of Ringo's plant paste salve, bandaged. 

If Mizu seems embarrassed by the amount of things being done for her, that she can't do all herself, being hurt, she shows it with silent defeat and quiet compliance. The vulnerability of being nursed back to health probably offends Mizu's personal code to not care about others and to not have friends and not need anyone else ever, or something. 

Akemi doesn't mind playing healer. Having a hand in the slow knitting back together of torn flesh, of checking the bruising darken and start to lighten, it's reassuring in the way nursing a sick bird or other small wounded animal might be. Though a small animal would probably be more grateful for her help. Less rude too. 

On that last night there, propped up to sit now that she feels stronger, redressed, new stitched lines of mended clothes in lighter thread visible on the blue, Mizu brings up her state of dress. 

“Akemi. It would be wise to change your kimono before we leave. Your portrait also wears red on those wanted posters.” 

Akemi rolls her eyes. “Well, you aren't going to decided for me what I can and can't wear. I wear the color well, and I like it. We won't argue on this.” 

“At least cover it with something dark,” Mizu sighs. Her mouth twists down in thought, and she reaches carefully by the futon where her few belongings are set, sword still in its extended hilt naganata form, scabbard next to it, wrap-around cape and big hat on top. 

Mizu offers up her dark blue cloak. 

“It's not torn and bloody,” she says, genuinely confused at Akemi's look. Akemi sniffs. 

Fine. She takes it with the jerkiness of irritation, not weirdly warmed at all by the gesture, very much not planning to cover anything she wears with it. 

The fabric is worn and strangely soft under her fingers. Tonight, she uses it as a pillow. It smells like the snow as it falls, salt, like the color of the overcast sky, the morning's air cold in her nose, the world—the wild—in a way nothing else ever has. It smells like Mizu. 

When she sleeps Akemi dreams she's flying over the ocean, a seabird, her feathers silver like scales, as free as the wind. 

Early the next day, the sky bright but imperceptible through the growling shroud of cloud, they take their leave from the brothel to the road. 

Mizu walks with an almost imperceptible unsteadiness in her stride, spectacles over her eyes again, offensively broad hat back on, weights back on her wrists and ankles, sword back in scabbard at her side, white scarf tied neatly back around her neck. 

She looks just like she did when I first saw her, Akemi thinks. 

Except for the cape, too big around Akemi's own shoulders. Outside, unsheltered from the knife handed, needle fingered cold, blown in by the wind, it helps her stay warm. 

There's snow falling today too, a steadying patter, goose feather thick, flakes falling like silver lashes. 

Madame Kaji and her girls see them off, walking them to the door. Mizu bows low and deep when they part, thanking them for their shelter and wishing them well in their upcoming days of business. 

The girls crowded by the front entrance are beyond flattered. There's giggling and waving and fawning, calls of “Come again!” from more than one; a few even sigh, press their hands to their hearts. 

Maybe one or two like Ise are doing it on purpose, glancing at Akemi with smirks and sly eyes to see her reaction, or out of some instinctual courtesan instinct to be a flirt, especially with any good looking decent man. 

But some of them really are a little bit smitten. Not that Mizu realizes it, in the slightest. Maybe she is the man—the foolish, idiot man, unaware of so much—after all. 

Akemi and Ringo stand and watch them try to give Mizu gifts. One girl gets pushed forward and runs the few steps up to where they stand, talking fast and out of breath and avoiding looking at Mizu at all, pink cheeks not hidden by the white powder on her face. 

She offers a bottle of not so cheap looking sake, shy. 

“I'm sorry, but I don't drink,” Mizu says, oblivious. The girl refuses to take the drink back. 

“For you, for your friends?” She asks, quick and high. 

Akemi scoffs at the way the girls are acting, the halting push and pull now in front of her. Ringo steps in to accept the sake with thanks on his master's behalf, stowing it in his bag. 

“Good for cooking,” he smiles in response to Mizu's scowl. 

They set out. 

Walking in the snow proves more difficult than Akemi remembers, from her limited experience. It only gets heavier the longer they walk, building up on the road, thickening underfoot. 

There's no horse for her this time, not even a stinking cart of filth to perch on for a ride, and she trots along through the drifts trying not to trip. It's miserably cold in a biting way Akemi's quickly learned she hates. She pulls the ends of Mizu's cloak tighter together. 

Ringo lingers back a bit to not leave her behind, but Mizu marches on ahead, sure in where she's going as they leave the corner of the red light district for greater Mihonoseki, weaving through busying streets, through merchants and playing children and buskers, past buildings and lantern lit shopfronts that all look the same. 

More than once, though, as her shoes get increasingly wet and her feet increasingly cold, Akemi sees that hat turn, feels those eyes on her before they turn back to walking onward, unhindered, unstoppable, single minded in her goal. Mizu goes and Akemi follows.