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It wasn’t long after their parents died that Komui took up work in a town market about an hour’s journey from the village he had grown up in as a child in order to put food into his baby sister’s mouth.
Selling scrap to buyers who would in turn take them to the factories in the major cities to be reworked was not the most intellectually stimulating work, but it was an honest living.
Well, mostly honest, he thought, smiling handsomely as the cart-handler pressed a coin purse into his hand and ambled off with a few kilograms worth of cheaply-made cooking pots. His father had been a blacksmith before he died, and while Komui had never been called to the craft he knew more about metallurgy than he let on.
The pots were sturdy enough for a domestic kitchen but they would not yield much iron when put through a proper blast furnace.
He had been paid more for the pots than he would have otherwise managed to get at a market like this one, though he could not say the same would be the case for the buyer when they tried to re-sell his scrap for a profit.
“Look at that face,” old Auntie Lin said, her thin mouth turning up a little wryly at the corner when Komui ducked back into the shop with his earnings, “you act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
Komui grinned at his proprietor and tipped the coin purse over into the battered tea tin that was used to collect their daily income. “He wouldn’t have made it to the main road yet, carrying that lot,” he pointed out, throwing himself down on the stool next to her work table as her gnarled hands flew back and forth over an abacus, “I could always refund him and get them back if you miss them that badly.”
“Cheeky boy,” Auntie Lin replied reproachfully, slapping his hand away as Komui started to trail his fingers over the colourful counting beads. “If you weren’t so good at throwing dust in the eyes of well-paying customers I wouldn’t stand for your lip.”
Komui shrugged at that, pulling his long legs up onto the stool and resting his chin on his knees. “People generally tend to be a little unsure of themselves,” he admitted, eyes falling on the coins that Auntie Lin placed on the tabletop as she counted out Komui’s share of the takings. “You’ve just got to be confident that you can convince them you’re on their side.”
The old woman snorted a little at that. “You’re too good for this life, child,” she sighed, leaving the coins out just long enough for Komui to be sure that she wasn’t undercutting him before sweeping them into a little bag and nudging it in his direction. Komui snatched it up and tucked it into the pocket of his tunic.
“That wasn’t meant as a compliment either, so don’t go getting a swelled head,” she added, tucking the tea tin back into a recess under the table as she hopped down from her chair and pottered down to the front of her shop so she could start closing up before the sun set.
Komui watched her, his expression carefully schooled as she hunkered down and started folding up the mats full of junk she had placed outside, continuing, “a bright boy like you ought to be taking the civil servants’ exams or getting a proper education, not trading scrap in a marketplace for chicken feed.”
Komui pressed his lips together at that, sighing a little through his nose.
“Hey now,” he told her, careful to keep his tone light as he slid off his perch to help her. “It’s not as bad as all that. With what you pay me I think ‘table scraps’ is a more accurate comparison than chicken feed, wouldn’t you say?”
Auntie Lin raised her eyebrows at that, looking a little baffled. “You say that like that makes it better,” she said, and Komui smiled a little.
“I don’t intend to work in the scrap business for the rest of my life, you know,” he replied, tucking the edges of the display mats in so that bits and bobs wouldn’t spill out of the sides when he lifted them up.
“This is just … temporary. At least until Lenalee is old enough to go to school so I don’t have to keep begging favours from the neighbours to keep an eye on her while I’m away.”
“Hmmm,” his boss murmured thoughtfully, as they placed the smaller arrays of junk on shelves at the back of the shop, “can’t say I know much about these foreign missionaries and their ways myself, but I suppose you turned out all right didn’t you?” she said cheerfully, slapping Komui on the back with a firmness that belied her small size.
“How is your sister?” she went on, before Komui could retort. “Did she like those shoes you got her for her birthday?”
“Adores them,” Komui said solemnly, unable to keep the smile out of his voice at the memory of Lenalee’s dark eyes going round and huge when Komui had presented her with a pair of black silk slippers that he had found at one of the night markets when he had been walking home one day.
The purchase had blown a hole clean through his savings, one that he was still recovering from in fact, but the tremulous disbelief and sheer joy on her face had been worth more than any coin. “She’d wear them all day and all night if I let her.”
“Well don’t forget to buy yourself something nice every now and again too, you hear?” Auntie Lin scolded, wagging her finger at him as Komui pulled the grill-gate shut across the storefront and padlocked it shut before handing the key back to her. She cupped her worn hands over his own and looked him dead in the eye.
“I know you fancy yourself some kind of martyr who would work himself to the bone for that girl’s sake,” she told him seriously, “but not everything is about sacrifice. Just … keep that in mind, won’t you?”
Komui stared at her, curious where this sudden serious streak had come from. “I will Auntie,” he responded, unsure if she would accept any other answer. She gave him a shrewd look, as though checking to make sure he was being sincere, before releasing him.
“Good lad,” she said gruffly, and made shooing motions at him. “That’s my piece said then. Now off with you. It’s getting late and these country roads are no place to be taking a leisurely stroll. I’ll need you back here first thing tomorrow morning and the last thing I want to hear from passing caravans is that they found your fool corpse at the bottom of a ditch because you got lost on the way home and tripped down a slope in the dark.”
Komui laughed at that. “Your concern warms my heart Auntie,” he sighed, placing a hand over his breastbone dramatically and dipping his head in acknowledgment. “Until tomorrow then.”
“Did you have fun today, xiǎo yàn zǐ?” Komui asked, crouched down on knees that still ached from a hard day’s work as he unbuttoned Lenalee’s coat and helped her step out of her black silk slippers.
“Uh-huh,” Lenalee said, wiggling out of his grasp and holding her hands out until Komui passed her slippers over. She clutched them to her chest. “Mrs. Hong made bao today, with red bean filling. I helped!”
“And the bean paste actually ended up in the bao this time?” Komui inquired teasingly, grinning when his tiny little sister whirled on him with a scowl.
“Of course it did!” she told him huffily, “Mrs. Hong said I’m a natural and - and that Big Brother is far too skinny for a boy his age,” she added, stumbling over her words in her haste as she gestured pointedly at the three-tiered lacquer lunch box that had been given to them before they had walked home, “so she made us dinner too!”
“I know xiǎo yàn zǐ, I was there,” Komui told her gently. He of course, had been winded by said lunchbox when the gregarious Mrs. Hong had cheerily shoved it against his chest and had wished them a good evening before telling him she would stop by early tomorrow morning to collect Lenalee again before he headed off to work. It wasn’t like Komui could have said no.
A small hand tugged at his sleeve. “You have to eat,” Lenalee told him seriously, “It’s polite.”
Komui did not relish the idea of stuffing sweet steamed buns into his face, nor any of the other no doubt rich food that Mrs. Hong thought a ‘growing boy’ ought to eat to keep his strength up. But his sister had been raised well (a little too well in hindsight, he thought now) and she was right.
That and Komui could not afford to offend his sister’s babysitter when he would not be able to find another one on extremely short notice. He suppressed a shudder.
“Well I suppose we should be grateful that dinner’s already been taken care of then,” he said at last, and wondered how many bites he would have to take before Lenalee was satisfied.
“That means an extra hour for storytime.”
Lenalee’s eyes went round. “Really?” she whispered, as though not daring to believe her ears.
“Really, really,” Komui said sincerely, and nearly tripped over the front step when Lenalee seized his fingers and pulled him further into their house.
“Then we have to eat now!” she told him earnestly, one small hand clutched around Komui’s and the other pressing her favourite silk slippers to her chest.
“You have to do it quickly too, okay? You always take forever to finish dinner.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Komui said lightly, his smile only growing on his face when Lenalee gave up pulling and scooted behind him, her hands flat against his backside as she shoved him forward. “I eat at a perfectly reasonable rate.”
“Brother.”
“All right, all right,” Komui soothed, turning around and sweeping his flustered little sister up into his arms. “How about this? I’ll eat as much as I can at dinner if you promise not to spend so much time in the bath that your fingers get all pruny again. Deal?”
“Aww,” Lenalee pouted, for she enjoyed moving the little model junk boats and wooden ducks that Komui had brought back from the market back and forth between her hands while he washed her hair, making up grand stories about their adventures till the bath water turned cold.
“Promise?” Komui wheedled, tugging gently at one of her pigtails.
Lenalee sighed as though he had just asked the entire world of her and pouted, burying her nose against his shoulder. “Promise,” she said at last, in a small, grumbly voice.
“That’s my girl.”
“Big Brother…?”
“Hmm?” Komui murmured, turning back from the oil lamp at Lenalee’s window and stretching himself out comfortably on the bed next to her.
Lenalee frowned, her small hands playing at the edges of the thick leatherbound book of fairytales spread out on the quilt in her lap. Her long hair hung down her shoulders, curling damp and soft with the scent of the honeylocust fruit he had used to scrub her down in the bath.
“Do you ever feel like Cinderella?”
Komui raised his eyebrows, his fingers stilling on a stray thread he had been pulling on Lenalee’s quilt. He remembered sitting at their mother’s side while she had woven the fabric on her loom, content in reading his books and keeping her company as she hummed a familiar lullaby to the unborn child in her womb.
“Is there a reason you think I should feel like Cinderella?” he asked instead, genuinely curious as to how she had developed this train of thought.
“Well,” Lenalee said slowly, leaning back into the warm crook of his arms as she thought through her words carefully, “It’s just … It’s just that you work so hard selling scrap at the markets and you’re always, always tired but you think I don’t notice and people say mean things about you all the time and it’s not … it’s not fair, that’s all.”
Komui’s eyebrows rose even higher at this. “Who’s been saying mean things?”
“Everyone,” Lenalee insisted, in the firm way that only a young child could, and proceeded to try and squeeze both herself and her book even closer against his side.
“Mrs. Hong always says what a waste it is that you dropped your studies when you could have gone on to be a great scholar and even worked for the Empress and … and I know Father Philippe’s been trying to talk you into going to Tongwen Guan in Beijing but you keep turning him down so he’s disappointed in you too, and those awful boys at the schoolhouse down the road said you should be more like Father than Mother so I punched them all in the nose and - ”
Komui laughed aloud at that and then quickly covered his mouth with his hand, though Lenalee looked more furious than teary-eyed. He cleared his throat.
“You really shouldn’t go around punching people, xiǎo yàn zǐ …”
Lenalee scowled at him. “But they were wrong!”
Komui shook his head. “Lenalee,” he said quietly, using his sister’s real name for once rather than the pet name their family had called her since she was a baby, “It doesn’t matter what they think.”
She frowned at him, continuing to look unconvinced.
He drew her into his lap. “This is not a Cinderella story,” he told her gently. “We know a lot of good people, don’t we? People who have helped us get by since Mother and Father died, who are willing to look out for us and feed us and are just concerned we’re not looking out for our futures. This is a good life, xiǎo yàn zǐ.”
“I … guess,” Lenalee allowed, curling her fists into the fabric of his tunic. “I just don’t like that they are right about one thing.”
“And what thing is that?”
“That you could be something greater,” she said in a very small voice, hunching into a ball so that her hair fell all over her face.
“You could go to Beijing,” she said, her voice muffled in her knees, “You could take the exam and become someone important and stop being so tired. You could be happy.”
“Lenalee Lee,” Komui said sharply, making her flinch a little in anticipation of a scolding, but Komui just put his arms around her, gathering the quilt around them like a warm nest. “How could I ever be happy without you?”
Lenalee sniffled a little as she curled her hands tighter around his arm. “Brother, I …”
He stroked her hair, cupping the back of her head like she was still a baby and cradling her to his chest.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” he asked her, rocking her back and forth, “That I would leave you in this village alone to live out a Cinderella-like existence so I could go back to my studies?”
“I just want you to be happy,” she told him miserably.
“Oh, xiǎo yàn zǐ,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head and feeling overwhelmed by how much he would do for the little person in his arms, “I’m already happy. I have you.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Komui replied, holding her little hand in his and doing his best to smile even though his heart ached. “I’ll always be there when you need me.”
Lenalee was silent for a long moment, thinking this over.
“And … And I’ll ask Auntie Lin for a day off soon so we could spend some more time together,” Komui added in a fit of desperation. “We could go walking in the fields and do something nice for everyone as a thank you for helping us out all this time, huh? What do you say?”
Lenalee looked up at him, her dark eyes hopeful in her round, sweet face.
“Okay,” she said at last, and guilt finally rolled off Komui’s stomach like a stone.
“Okay,” he parroted back, sinking back into the pillows in relief, his hand still stroking the back of his sister’s head.
“...Brother?”
“Yes, xiǎo yàn zǐ?”
Lenalee trailed her hand down the colourful ink drawings of her fairytale book, flipping the pages as Komui started to idly braid her hair for the night.
“If this isn’t a Cinderella story, does that mean you won’t be marrying a prince either?”
Komui’s hands stilled. He thought about long dark hair in spring breezes, crinkled lines at the corners of twinkling eyes and laughter that made warmth sit in your belly like honey. He thought of young government officials in their imperial robes and how handsome they had looked, of sloppy kisses with a merchant trader’s son behind his father’s smithy, and fire in his skin as older, calloused hands strip his tunic off in a back room of the local inn.
He thought of his sister, and who would take care of her when he was gone and shook his head, caging the butterflies that occasionally flutter in his gut every time he flirted with an attractive customer at the market until the feeling was little more than a slight discomfort.
Lenalee was, and always will be, his top priority.
“Oh, well,” he began, careful to keep his tone casual, “I’ve never run into any princes during business hours. Are they easy to recognize?
Lenalee nodded solemnly, seemingly satisfied with his answer. “You’ll know him when you see him,” she told him seriously, lifting her book a little as though hoping Komui would reference the illustrations and take notes. “And then you’ll fall in love and get married and we’ll never want for anything ever again.”
Considering the fact that Komui was unlikely to run into any beautiful blonds without making a trip all the way to the eastern ports on the coast, he figured he was pretty safe on that front.
He shook his head, smiling a little in spite of himself.
“That would be nice, xiǎo yàn zǐ.”
He sat up a little straighter then, leaning over his sister and sweeping his hand across the pages of her book.
“Now then, should we read something besides Cinderella tonight?”
Lenalee perked up at that, and for a time they forgot about princes and cinders and bettering themselves so that they would not be a burden to others. Life had been good to them. Life had been kind.
Komui often wondered in later years if he should have said more that night, whether he should have gone downstairs after Lenalee had fallen asleep and made an offering to their ancestors to thank them for their blessings; for all the goodness they had in their life and apologizing for thinking that they could somehow be worse off.
A Cinderella story was not supposed to end in ashes.
He could not have known that he would never end up asking Auntie Lin for time off to spend with his sister and their friends and neighbours, but by god he wished that he had.
For when Komui returned home from work the following day he came back to fire and ash and a blood red sky, to people’s screams and demon-like creatures straight out from Revelations, to a nightmare he thought he would never have to relive again after his parents’ deaths.
He did not know that his tiny sister could be so brave, coming down hard on these creatures with the force of steel, her favourite silk slippers shod on her feet like sabatons.
He did not know that when men in black uniforms stole her away while Komui had been on the road burying their dead with the villagers that remained that her terrified screams would haunt him for years to come.
He did not know that would be the last time he went back to the marketplace near the village where he had grown up and that he would never return.
He wondered how long Auntie Lin spent wondering what happened to him, watching the road that led to the marketplace and tutting to herself as another day rolled by and Komui still did not show up for work, all because he was in a panic trying to figure out where his sister had been taken and how he was going to chase after her.
That part of his life feels like it belonged to another man now, like he was just an observer occasionally looking through a murky window and not being entirely sure what he was looking at.
There are times though, in his quieter moments, that he remembers eating bao with his sister and reading to her after dinner and wonders what their village looks like now. Does it still stand, or had it been wiped out completely in another attack since?
Did anyone move into their old house after Komui had sold it to fund his trip to the Black Order’s Asian Branch to seek out his sister or was it abandoned and falling to ruin?
Did people ever wonder what happened to them? Order personnel were forbidden from communicating with the outside world, so as far as Komui knew, everyone from his past life thought they were dead.
He wonders what they would think of him now. He is not in the employ of the Empress nor is he a scholar, but he is someone important, even if he very much wishes that he wasn’t.
There is so much about his sister that has changed since he knew her, and it breaks his heart, but in so many other ways she is still the same little girl who worried that he was working too hard and wants nothing more than his happiness.
He still hasn’t run into the prince she had hoped would take them away from all their troubles, but he has found love and a sharp mind and kindness in a man who has no business being kind in the world they are forced to live and work in, and some day Komui hopes to tell him how glad he is to have found him.
It is not the life that Komui had hoped to build for his sister, not by a long shot. There is no happy ending to this fairytale but that doesn’t mean he is going to stop trying to give it one.
He will take Lenalee home one day.
It is a thought that he repeats to himself every day, even when sometimes all he wants to do is sleep for an eternity. Some might say that it was a hopeless thought, delusional even, and that he might as well get used to being surrounded by stone walls and lab equipment and rain that never seems to cease.
Komui did not care. They would go home after the war or die trying.
After all, he still had a promise to keep.
And if that meant sacrificing every day for love’s sake then, well. It was not as though he was a stranger to doing such things.
They still have each other, even if all they have left is cinders and old memories that feel like they might as well belong to someone else.
It is happiness enough.
END.