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She dances through killing fields, spreading the scent of daisies. It is not a love of blood that drives her; she has always found the scent disturbing, the texture sickening as it floods across her skin. It is hard to remove from hair and nails and clothing, and her lord sometimes refuses to look at her if she is bloodstained. It is not that she rejoices in the destruction of her enemies, for she believes that no one is evil, truly, that everyone may yet be worthy of forgiveness. It is not that she would wish this upon anyone. She plucks the last daisy from amidst the grasses, adds it briefly to the large bouquet. And then, one by one, she places a flower upon each corpse. They cannot waste time in burial, she cannot anger her lord by dirtying the kimono he had commissioned for her; would not, even if it would not hurt him (yes, hurt him, she knows it would pain him to see his gift spurned; an agony not of pride but of honest rejection, though he knows it not) for it would hurt her. She could never allow anything that passed from her lord's hands to her own be harmed in the slightest. So she picks her flowers and she casts them down, a strange and beautiful dance she weaves through the bodies in geta that are weighted perfectly for even her small feet. She dances and she sings, until Jakken tells her it is time to go, until she has but one daisy left. The wind rises, and the blood-spattered grasses wave good-bye. She keeps the single remaining flower as long as it lasts, keeps the memories of the men who died for as long as she can bear them, for as long as her lord will tolerate the sight of the thing behind her ear or jabbed haphazardly into the top of her obi. She knows she will always smell of daisies. |
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