Title: Korogi Author: JC Sun Rating: PG-13 Summary: The story of Mr. Wolf and Mrs. Wolf. Written in almost abysmal ignorance about Japanese culture and history as well as self-imposed ignorance as to everything that happens after the conclusion of the Kyoto arc. People tell me that I've taken so many liberties with the 'real' universe that it might as well be an original fiction--oh well. I've always thought that Sai-nii was entirely too good to be somebody's property. Also, as far as my 'canon' universe extends, Tokio exists only in a reference by Saitou. My apologies if I step on any toes. Thanks to Jess for the translations and information. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, my problem and I *did* take certain creative fictions for the sake of drama. Tell me about 'em at anasile@aol.com * Consider this: A house in Tokyo. It's not a particularly fine or lovely house, but nor is it a particular poor or wretched place--it's one of those houses turned out in dozens by the local construction crews, and it's got the same boxy structure that all the others have. Identical, really, except it's maybe a little smaller than the others and there's a stand of bamboo outside the door. It's a magnificent stand: the leaves thick and full and dark, masking some of the sheer utilitarian ugliness of the house, and somehow, they impart a sense of wildness about the place, and looking at them, there's an incredible feel of solitude. Something about the house, the self-contained walls and the absolute stillness that hangs around it--it's a place from another world. Another time. * Now then. Thirty years ago, a country lord's house. It is a fine old house, made to shelter many branches of the family, but nowadays, rooms and hallways--entire wings, really--stand empty because all the family left are an old man and his three year old daughter. The old man is dying. His daughter has never known her mother, which is a pity because after her father dies, she will be utterly alone except for her elder half-brother who lives in Kyoto, and after her chichue dies, she will got to live with him. She has never seen this brother of hers for he is decades and decades older than she is, and when he turned eighteen, he left his father's house for the city, for Western ways. Her mother was the Lord's second wife and died of tuberculosis shortly after she gave birth, but while she lived was an exquisite creature with porcelain skin and wide, dark eyes that were the precise shape of ever-so-lightly tilted almonds. The soft, quiet younger daughter of a government official who was so poor as to be peasantry, she gratefully left home at fifteen be wife to an old man who was nearly four times her age. At seventeen, she gave birth to her first and only child. Her husband was rapturously happy and doted on the infant even though it was female, and she was deliriously relieved that her lord forgave her for delivering a female. But all that is beside the point. She is dead; the husband she so devotedly worshipped will soon be dead, and the only proof of their brief love affair will be a tiny creature answering to the name of Tokio. Now, she sits in the courtyard, playing with a rice doll, watched over by her bodyguard-cum-babysitter-cum-family. "Sa-nii," she says "," she says, holding her arms out to him. One day, on one of her frequent trips to the village, her maid-cum-nanny left her with him for want of another babysitter, and on that day, Saitou acquired another shadow by thrashing a villager who was being impertinent to his tiny charge. Unused to such unabashed, unquestioning love, he dotes on this tiny, solemn little girl that worships him. She follows him to the fields, to the woodshed, to the practice grounds, and she would follow him to the privy except Saitou rather firmly forbade her. Her face had screwed up then, and she had drawn breath for the beginnings of a temper tantrum, but then, one look from her beloved Sa-nii had shut her up. "Sa-nii." He looks at her, this tiny little doll of a thing all wrapped in stiff gold-and-blue silk, her hair all pinned up with jade and face done up like a great lady of the court because when her father sees her this way, he can pretend that his beloved Matsu is still alive. The effect is faintly grotesque, but it fits this grand old dying house with the still rooms, and she is so utterly foreign to everything else in his entire life that the sight of her sitting in cherry blossoms and playing with a ragged doll made out of rice-stalks and a few dabs of paint for a face burns into his mind. The image will haunt him for years to come, and it's only decades later that he'll realize this was the moment of destiny for him, that after this it was impossible for him to join the Ishin Shishi. To preserve the little girl in jade and silk who played with cherry blossoms and dolls-- This is Japan, this is good, this is order. "Sa-nii," she repeats, this time more insistently, so he takes her in his arms and braces himself for the inevitable tug on his bangs. She thinks they look like antennae and that he looks like a cricket in his black practice-clothes and long legs, and she thinks that the clang of steel swords rather sounds like chirps. "Koorogi," she whispers, nestling her small face in his shoulder. "Will you come see me in Kyoto?" He does not say anything because he cannot promise her anything, and she realizes this, so she tightens her arms around his neck and presses her face against his shoulder, leaving a print of white powder on his black shirt. Then, in a tiny soft voice that he feels more than hears, "Ai shiteru yo, koorogi." His throat clenches. It would be shameful to cry, he reminds himself--a boy of eleven, crying because of a little girl, but nevertheless, the tears rise up and choke him and are on the verge of bursting out when Tokio's nanny comes running out of the house and grabs her by the arm so that she can watch her father die. * Years later, he's in Kyoto during the Bakumatsu, taking part in Shinsengumi strike against a secret convocation of the Ishinishi's political leaders. The spy was right: the Hitokiri is engaged elsewhere this night, assasinating some pompous corrupt official, and without him, the Shinsengumi swarm over the house and crush the token Ishin Shishi body guard within minutes. Somewhere along the line, somebody knocked a lamp over, and now the entire house is ablaze, crackling. The flames are reflected in his drawn blade. Spatters of blood mar the reflection, but the good steel throws back a good representation, and when Saitou moves his blade, the light runs so that it seems as if he's holding a shaft of pure light in his hands. Pure light hasn't ever cut like this, though. Saitou doesn't even bother with gatotsu, and instead, slips in underneath that faulty defense and stabs high in the chest, crunching into the torso with an easy flick his arm that makes a wet noise. The man cries once, stiffening into the blade, then falls onto the ground in a wet heap, slipping off the sword with the limpness of a thoroughly dead body, and the blood already starting to slow. A rustle at his side makes him pivot, blade slicing out in his usual policy of kill first, ask later, but he halts the swing just in time to see it hover on the side of a pale neck. The mound the man was protecting has stood up now, and she stands there, watching him with a cool face, cradling that teapot, standing next to the the cooling body of her fiancé, and he realizes that he knows those wide, lovely and utterly expressionless eyes that reflect his sword and his face so perfectly--he knows those eyes from somewhere, from somewhen. From somewhen. * Because he has no-where else to take her, he takes Tokio back with him. She follows him three paces back every step of the way, her head bowed, and looking like nothing so much as a thing out of the old historical novels. When he takes his seat the table, she stands behind him. When he goes onto the practice field, she waits at the edge of the field with his gear and a pot of tea for him. At night, she refused to leave him and curled in a corner in his room until Saitou got her another futon, but still, she doesn't much use it. He's woken up at night with Tokio sitting next to him, hands clasped, head bowed, and those huge, mute eyes watching every breath he takes. Once, he woke to those ghostly-light fingers trailing across his face, light as a spider's kiss. It's occurred to him that she could have killed him, that she could have slit his throat and he could never have stopped her, that he was the one who killed her brother, the only family she had left. The other men laugh, snicker about how Saitou has all the luck with the women, that even the Ishin Shishi women can't resist his charms, but quietly--even the ones who usually mock and joke their leader because they see the look in his eyes, the way he looks at her, the way he looks at anyone who talks to her. And she's a strange enough creature: silent, never speaking unless spoken to, watching people through the thick fringe of her lashes, hands carefully arranged in front of her. Even her movements are silent: once, Okita was cleaning his sword. She had been watching him from the doorway, waiting for him to pause so she could bring him his tea, and she finally brushes the edge of her slippers against the rush matting to get his attention. . . Out of sheer reflex, he whips around, drops into stance and unsheathes his katana all in one smooth motion, the tip of the sword coming within inches of that face-- She blinked, gave him the strangest smile as she set down the tea underneath the blade and walked away. Eventually, as much because she creeps the Shinsengumi swordsmen as that she should have her own house, Saitou finally rents her a house, leaves her sitting on the bare floor, with not a stick of furniture in the house and only her precious teapot. The next time he comes, there is a scroll of three cranes in flight over a Buddhist pagoda and the time after that, a fine bronze urn. When he finally realizes that she's going to spend whatever money he sends her on artwork and fine antiques, he buys a futon, blankets, a stove and lamps at the market. He deducts it out of her weekly stipend. After all, a man must do something with his money. He starts spending his spare time at the house. Again, the men are amused by his Ishin Shishi mistress, but they don't dare make jokes to his face, the evenings are silent but comfortable. He'll come around after dinner, and she'll have a pot of tea ready, and he'll smoke cigarettes while she reads one of her interminable poetry books or, if she's feeling particularly sociable, plays a selection on an old-fashioned lute she rescued from an old woman who was ready to turn it into firewood. Other times, he'll come by and help her with the housework. There's a peace about the house that warms his bones. This puzzles him. Not being an introspective man, he pushes the idea to the side of his head. There is no time during the killing time of the Bakumatsu for such weakness, yet, in spare moments, he finds himself turning this thought over and over in his head, the puzzle of why she hasn't tried killing him yet, the strange nights he spends with her, and above all, the mystery of why he keeps drifting back to that house. Night after night, he'll go out into the compound yard for some fresh air, and his feet will start pulling him into the street, and ten minutes later, he's standing on her doorstep and those cool eyes are looking up at him through a thick fringe of dark lashes. She draws the door backwards and steps aside, murmuring something polite underneath her breath, and he'll settle down on the mat she's prepared for him. He'll pour himself a cup of tea and read, and she'll sit down across from him and read, too, some old romantic epic. He can't figure out why he comes her so often, but he gets the answer one night while walking to her house. There's a group of Ishin Shishi swordsmen hovering just down the street from his house. He kills them with--not a professional force, really, and some of them are wounded, so they couldn't have been intended for him. A practice job. Not intended for him--the Ishin Shishi couldn't have been stupid enough to waste their foot soldiers on him, not this time, and then his gut clenchs as he realized just what precisely they were here for. . . To kill a lone, defenseless woman while her bodyguard was out--they must have decided she'd turned traitor. Cowards. He breaks out into a dead sprint, all the aches and pains of a day's fighting forgotten, and the path to the house is all beaten and trampled, and there's a sticky pool of blood cooling on one of the steps, and with a twitch in his jaw, he decides that's going to kill twenty for every second she suffered, that if the Ishin Shishi thought that Mibu's Wolf was bad before--the garden goes into a blur as another group bursts out from the side of the house, and he parries and thrusts, trying to move towards the house, blocked, and then there's a long shrill scream that makes the world slip into red and it's forever before he's finished with the swordsmen and gets into the house and can slide the door open with hands that are stained and shaking with blood and then-- The assassin lies dead on the floor, his chest carved wide open. His mouth is wide open in surprise, shocked, no doubt, by the unusual harbinger of his death. She yanks the blade out of his throat. She's buried it pretty deep, and she has to pull it out with both hands, and it finally comes out with an audible pop. Something in the back of Saitou's head mutters that that's *his* spare wazishiki in her hands, but he says nothing and merely gazes at her, this tiny, thin slip of a woman with a spray of blood across her cheek, but when his gaze lingers too long, her voice is very soft and measured, but the edge on her words is as sharp as the blade in her hands. "I am the daughter and sister of swordsmen: it would take an idiot of truly epic proportions not to have learned something from them." Her eyes are as cold and hard as his, and with a jolt, he gets the answer to his questions--he's been falling in love with her. * On one of his rare nights off, he takes her to a restaurant. A place serving soba, of course. Her eyebrows register only the smallest change, and she lets him order plain soba for the two of them. She does insist on the most expensive tea, though. "You killed my brother and my fiancé." Once again, her voice is soft, gentle, but there's a sharpness, a bitterness to the way the words slip out of her mouth. "By all laws of honor, Saitou, I should kill you for that or kill myself." He pauses in the middle of breaking open his chopsticks. "I'd rather you did neither." She puts her cup down. "So would I." They finish their dinner in absolute silence. Saitou pays for dinner, and they leave, but this time, she walks at his side. Afterwards, in the privacy of his room, he kisses her full across the mouth, and with only a moment's hesitation, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back, open-mouthed and hungry. * Back to the house in Tokyo. It's late at night. The moon's given the earth a premature frost, and silence hangs in the air--it's late at night and the moon is set to begin it's decline soon, and she's been waiting up for him for hours, for days now. The crunch of a boot on gravel in the street breaks the quiet like a shot, and her her fingers slip around the wazashiki. She's learned to use it much better now; after that one incident, Saitou gave her some rudimentary lessons, and she's picked a good deal of it up from some hidden reservoir buried in her blood. At the creak of the gate and the snick of the lock, her thumb flicks the hilt so a centimeter of the blade shows, and at the sound of steps on her doorstep makes her rise up, lithe and young again, the sword half-drawn in her hands. When fingers creep around the edge of the door, she drops into a stance, the blade full-out, hovering on the intruder's throat when he steps in. The edge of Saitou's mouth twitches in what could conceivably be termed a smile at such an affectionate greeting, and he gently bats the sword away from his throat. She lets him, and the tiny twitch of her mouth is all the more greeting that's needed. * end * Commetns to anasile@aol.com