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Oddly enough, it's the trail of tiny, crumpled bodies that finally breaks him, glossy fur and bright eyes dull with blood and death. Another of the invaders' senseless cruelties, and one that he knows should pale in insignificance next to the atrocities he and Sora ride past every day - bodies burned, hanging from trees, locked in cages, littered with arrows. But when the last blasphemous savage falls under his blade, when the last yips and chirps of the surviving divine messengers have faded with the wind, it is the incongruent lightness of the last limp body in his hands as he lifts it to the pyre that shatters the seal of Jin's tightly bound rage.
The sound that escapes him is a cousin to the high-pitched screams that once echoed from the tiny throats of perhaps the island's most innocent victims yet. But it's a brutal, vicious keening - nothing like the bright-edged shrieks he'd been taught were the Inari's laughter. Jin buries his face in copper-scented fur to try and contain the shameful sounds pouring out of his throat, tries to swallow down the grief that slices up from his gut and through his chest so it doesn't cleave his tongue in two. He tries to tell himself that this is a base indulgence, that he should be above this, be the master of his emotions. With whatever shreds of his pride and honor remain, Jin tries to smother the firestorm roiling in his chest down into something useful - embers to bank against the future chill of loss and those moments of weakness when he misplaces his resolve in the face of exhaustion.
He grits his teeth, holds it in until it feels like his ribs glow red with the strain of it, smoldering like the bones of one of the dozens of half-burnt farmhouses he'd ridden by on the way here - nothing left on the inside of them except the stains of cruelty and the ashes of a former life. The long guard hairs are soft against his cheeks, soft the way he'd been as a boy - chasing golden orioles and laughing foxes through the trees with Ryuzo, or crying secretly in the stables with his face pressed into his pony's mane. But the scents of musk and wet fur aren't enough to drown out the metallic bite of blood that burns like bile on the back of his tongue.
Jin wishes it would burn this softness out of him. Maybe then the thought of Ryuzo wouldn't slip between his ribs like a knife, wouldn't leave him feeling like he's choking on his own endlessly bleeding heart. Maybe then the broken little sounds he can't quite muffle would cease, maybe the burning helplessness currently rattling his bones in a shameful display of weakness would settle into stillness the way he'd been taught.
Maybe then he wouldn't feel so alone.
"I've never seen a samurai fight like that."
Distantly he recognizes that he has lost control, that he is panicking, and if he could breathe he would be more concerned - but right now death feels like it would be a release and he is so very tired.
"He is a vengeful spirit... back from the grave to slaughter the Mongols."
He wonders if death would take this time, without Yuna here to save him.
His entire body aches from the tension of holding in the storm that's howling in his heart and his head, heart pounding like the hoofbeats on the beach at Komoda, breath coming quick and sharp like the last desperate gasps of the men under his banner. His blood roars in his ears as Jin curls in on himself, fox still in his arms, as if driven by the animal instinct to protect the soft center of his body. It makes him smaller, less of the proud lord he should be, but then he already knows that he's not enough to take up the empty space left by the loss of Tsushima's samurai. He was too gentle as a boy, probably as a man, even. Too weak for his father, too undisciplined for his uncle, too soft for the slaughter.
Komoda had given him teeth, though. Sharp and biting as anyone could wish, yes - but grown in wrong, misset in his jaw and unfamiliar in his mouth. They slice into his own flesh as often as his enemies’, tearing and rending until it's impossible to breathe or eat for the blood drowning him.
"That man fought like an animal... or a demon."
He'd watched their stablemaster put down a foal once, still wet from its mother's body, the mare still heaving and gasping in the straw from her labors.
"His jaw, young master," Shin had said quietly, stroking a gentle hand down the small neck before pointing at the foal's misshapen head. "He will never be able to eat or even breathe as he should."
Jin feels like he hasn't taken a deep breath in months.
It was a quick affair, shocking and unexpected to the boy he'd been then, the boy who'd slept in the barn so as not to miss the birth and had been indulged by both his parents and the stablemaster.
"It is brief pain but a lasting kindness," he'd told Jin, sorrow heavy in his voice. Face pressed into fur, Jin wonders if someone will pay him the same kindness when this is all over, when he must confront the warping of his soul into something monstrous for the sake of his people, for their home.
Old Shin had let Hoshi scent her dead foal one last time before gathering the small body in his arms. "So she knows what has happened, young master - so she can grieve."
Jin hopes someone will have the kindness in them to tell Yuna and Taka and Norio what has become of their friend. Hopes someone will whisper his name on the wind for the kami so that their messengers do not look for him, retire Sora to green pastures and leisure and quiet days instead of blood, mud, and endless treks on not enough grain and even less rest. The thought of their grief is an iron band around his chest, one that feels like it crushes muscles already straining to pull enough air into the bellows of his lungs. He tries to breathe out the fear and panic and pain as he'd been taught, but he can't seem to convince the rest of him that he's not drowning, not falling, not dying on blood-soaked sand with the screams of men and horses echoing in his ringing ears.
So he gives himself over to it, stops fighting for the first time in what feels like a century.
He gives into the panic, lets go of his hold on screams that feel ripped from his chest with something barbed before sliding into gut-wrenching sobs that force him to turn aside from the pyre as he retches with the force of them.This storm is not sustainable, Jin knows, and so he simply waits for his body to realize it.
When the waves of it and his own heartbeat have ceased pounding in his ears, when the raging knots of sorrow and shaking have broken on the rocks of his body's endurance and untangled just a little? Jin inhales the silence of the twilight with only the slightest of hitching breaths, places the last fox on the pyre, and lights it with steady hands.
He touches a forehead tacky with blood to the earth, honoring both their sacrifice and the kami they'd served. As he stands, he feels the familiar brush of a bushy tail against his shins, the cold press of a tiny nose against the back of his hand - but when he looks? There's only the wind and Sora whickering curiously. Jin swings into the saddle, feeling oddly light as he turns Sora's head towards Yarikawa, Yuna, and his next task.
Kami's bright laughter—
foxes dance through sacred shrines
wind whispers comfort.