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The decision isn’t his, at first.
The fallout of an encounter with a broad man with heavy hands and dark eyes—a bookbinder, he claimed, initially.
Mizu will always be irked that his younger self bought such an obvious lie.
Not like him to be so trusting. Not like him to be so guileless.
He had thought, when he first observed Chiaki’s beggings for assistance from Master Eiji, that he recognised desperation. Despair. Disease, of a kind.
Perhaps he did. Only, not the kind he was familiar with.
Swordfather saw through it. This is his way, Mizu knows; to see everything of consequence, if nothing of none.
Soft.
That was the word Chiaki had used.
Soft.
Laid out in the mud with a bloody forehead and shame scratching at his face, Mizu would have preferred to have been struck again than to hear such a thing.
He feels, dangerously, as if he is about to unravel. To be unravelled.
He thinks, momentarily, of inevitability.
Such is his existence. Only so much can be done to hide a hideous thing before its hideousness seeps through, like pus on a poorly-dressed wound.
His eyes.
His face.
His body, it seems.
Growing.
Changing, in ways he has no control over, none, no matter how much he might wish that he did.
He had hoped nobody would notice. He barely has, himself.
But Chiaki makes it plain. His gaze and his words, if not his direct naming of it.
s o f t
Oh, how it will haunt him.
The voice, and the tone.
Echo and warp in the weeks and years to come.
Girl.
Woman.
Weak.
He hates it.
Hates the man who spoke it.
Hates, particularly, that this is the association he is forced to make; to equate softness with both femininity and failure, as if one is in any way inarguably linked to the other.
He supposes that some women he has met have been soft, and some feminine, and some failures.
He thinks of this as a matter of consequence, more than causation.
Until Chiaki, that is.
Haunting and haunting and haunting.
////
It will hit him like the chill of winter’s onset.
In a rare moment of total privacy, Mizu stands in front of a long, dirty mirror in the back of the Swordmaster’s workshop and disrobes with lowered eyes.
Knows what he’ll see, but is still unprepared, somehow.
A change of shape, he expects. Reflections differ over time. This is living. Ageing. This is, almost, luck.
But a change of self, he cannot reckon with.
It is minor. No denying that. He should count himself fortunate, to be tall, to be lean, that his voice is not so difficult to pitch the way he needs it to sound.
Minor, but… there.
The light curve to his waist, his hips, his thighs. The swell of his chest. His nipples.
He wants to blink and refocus anew. See it, without seeing it.
What does it matter, really?
How can such superficial features make him any less of the person he decides he is?
Where is it written that a body such as his and a body such as—as Chiaki’s, as if he is any real measure of a man—were two distinct, separate things?
Mizu tries, for an admirable length of time, to rail against it in this way.
Tells himself, for as long as he can bear, that this means nothing.
That he is a boy because he says he is a boy, and one day he will be a man when he says he is a man, and these are the only truths that really matter when it comes to the issue of the self; the ones we choose, and the ones we share.
Until he looks in the mirror again, and it is not so much a reflection as an echo.
Soft.
What a sting it is to hear another’s words applied to our own body with such force they reshape it without our permission.
Mizu scrutinises himself with a cruel voice on a loop between his ears, and all he can see is round and soft and supple, no matter how many times he blinks.
Mixed breed, too.
That is what Chiaki had also said.
Monster, he did not say, because he did not need to.
These are Mizu's truths.
His cage.
Anything else is illusion—smoke and ceremony, in place to disguise that which he is incapable of avoiding, altering, opting out of.
He clenches his fists against the powerlessness of it.
Not so easy, it turns out, to be a boy. Even when you actively try.
And yet still as necessary as it ever was.
He does not often curse his own existence with the same vehemence of those around him, but on the day he tears strips from the sarashi he has saved for this purpose, Mizu wishes, more dearly than he has ever wished for anything, that he were tearing strips from himself.
////
It works, which surprises him.
The bindings around his chest make him flat, angular, firm. Hard. Strong.
Mizu likes it, the feeling of strength. Not something he’s used to. But something he could get used to, given half the chance. A monstrous boy is a mildly better thing to be than a monstrous girl.
He can examine his reflection, wear his tunic, move through his small, stunted life with relative ease again.
Almost as if he can see the changes occurring or being hidden—or both—Master Eiji sits outside with him one evening, at the small fire Mizu has set for warmth, and to busy himself. It is not particularly cold.
“We must travel tomorrow. To Kohama.”
Mizu tenses.
Stares at the flames, and the way the logs crumble and burn. He pokes at the embers with a stick and tries not to think of his mother.
“I cannot go with you.”
“You can,” Swordfather says.
Nothing else.
Never much for elaborating.
“Those who know me, will fear me. Or chase me, to prove they are not afriad. Those who do not… they will, when they see my face. I cannot return there.”
Master Eiji tsks. As if Mizu is talking nonsense. As if Mizu has not made himself plain, on another evening much like this one.
I am made of mixed metal.
In response, Swordfather had only spoke of steel, and of strength.
Pure, and impure.
Stupid old man.
“We need food,” he says. “Supplies. Rice, and fish. Are you not hungry?”
“You have never needed to go to the village before.”
“I was on my own. I made other arrangements.”
Mizu looks at him. Doubts the implication of his words.
“You make swords,” Mizu says. “Beautiful craftsmanship. And you live here, alone. Is a trip to the village so difficult, by comparison?”
“My home is mine,” he says, as if it is obvious. “The workshop, the forge. This yard. I can walk to the fenceline and back without hesitation. Understand?”
“Kohama is… unfamiliar. Not laid out in the way you need it to be.”
Swordfather folds his hands neatly over the handle of his walking stick. “Not enough for me to make the journey alone, no.”
“Does that not irk you? To be rendered so helpless?”
“I help myself. Use my stick. Now, I ask you. If I am rendered anything, it is reliant on such things, and I have them, so I use them. It is not important.”
“It’s bullshit. Your blindness makes our world hostile to you. Weakens you.”
“You think me weak?”
Mizu shakes his head, pointlessly.
“No, Swordfather. I only meant…”
“No village is designed for old men who cannot see, Mizu. That is a defect of the village. Not of me.”
Mizu tosses his stick into the fire and stands.
He should shut up—they both should. It is not like Mizu is unfamiliar with the concept of navigating a world that is not built for him.
“It’s not fair,” he mutters.
The words tip out of him and into the dirt, the fire, kicking at the embers.
It is a stupid thing to say, and Mizu feels small for it. He waits out the ensuing silence with the fire consuming his attention, wishing he’d kept quiet.
Swordfather laughs.
A hum, at first, of amusement. Then a chuckle. Then he’s laughing—a loud, broad sound, equal parts lightness and ferocity. He tips backward with it, and it is still tapering off when he stands, grunting, and reaches into the pocket of his haori.
He holds his hand out in Mizu’s direction, facing him. Something sits in his palm.
Mizu squints.
Spectacles. Small, fashioned from steel and glass. Tinted glass. Yellow.
“I have not fashioned anything like this in some time,” Swordfather says. “But they should help.”
Mizu has to swallow, because his throat is closing up. He blinks.
Another costume. Another illusion.
Or a disguise, carefully crafted out of necessity and… care.
“No,” he says, floundering in the new kind of tightness in his chest. “I—I cannot take them.”
“Bah.” Swordfather leans his stick against his hip to grab at Mizu’s wrist, pulls his hand to his, deposits the glasses into his grip. “There is no shame in needing things to be a certain way, or in changing them, if they are not.”
Mizu clutches his gift. Inhales, deeply, against a rising sob. The action makes him aware of the bindings around his chest. Deeply aware.
“To adapt is to survive,” says Master Eiji, shuffling past him. “To survive is to have a greater chance at getting this revenge you are so concerned with, however unwise such a quest may be. I would think survival quite important for you.”
Mizu opens his mouth to argue, but he’s gone.
He studies the spectacles in his hands. Unfolds each arm carefully. They are light. Sturdy. Unique.
He holds them in front of his face, squinting through the glass. The early evening sky, the darkening shape of the trees, take on a new hue. Not so black. Not so blue.
Mizu smirks, and puts them on.
////
Market day.
The stench of fish and salt water. He pushes a small cart and speaks rarely, guiding Swordfather from stall to stall, dependent on his list and his whims.
A man wearing a stiff apron covered in scales and dried guts hands over a package of fish meat. He meets Mizu’s eye without hestitation, or reproach. His face is a faint yellow colour, his apron blood-red. As is much of the world around him.
“There, boy,” says the fishmonger, not unkindly. “Growing lad like you needs plenty of meat in his belly.”
Mizu stores the package in a basket packed with snow and allows himself the smallest of smiles.
It feels as if he’s… gotten away with something. Multiple things.
There’s amusement in it. Satisfaction.
He says, “Thank you,” with his voice as quiet and husky as he can manage, like he’s practiced, and the fishmonger says, “Welcome,” and it’s a pleasant exchange, when it could so easily not be.
When another man, older and weather-beaten and drunk, stumbles into him on their way out of the village, he shoves Mizu, growling, Watch it, whelp.
Even this—a slurred, meaningless insult—lands as a kind of success.
Not monster, not dog. Just a boy, irritating underfoot.
It’s foreign, the feeling of victory.
Mizu thinks he could get used to this, as well.
////
His mother beat him when he was younger.
Shaved his head.
Shouted safety and boyhood, and demanded both from him, as if he were capable of giving either.
The first of many transgressions, he thinks; that he tried anyway, regardless, and almost half-succeeded, for a time.
That was the first time something in Mizu’s life burned to the ground, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Nothing lasts forever, in any case.
////
The bindings around his chest, however effective they prove, are not without fault.
The visual remains in tact—the look, the illusion. It’s the feeling that falters, far quicker than he’d like. His eternal, bone-deep inadequacies rising to the surface, no matter how hard he tries to stifle them.
He’s assisting Swordfather the first time it happens.
At the forge, he hands Mizu his tools to free his hands, and in reaching for them, pain lances down Mizu’s side, sharp and sudden. He winces—nearly drops the tongs onto the dirt floor. Grunts, too, a note of discomfort he can’t swallow.
Swordfather looks in his direction. Mizu clears his throat. The moment passes.
The wrappings around his torso have been there maybe one week. He’s not sure; there seemed little need to change them like he might other undergarments.
He waits out the day impatient and unnerved. Wonders, over his evening chores, whether he has wound the strips of fabric too tightly, whether they need washing, whether he should use more material to account for… well. Growing.
When Mizu confronts his mirror again, it is to hastily unwind the fabric encasing him. It sticks in places, especially when he nears the end. The shifting of flesh is disquieting. The cool air on his bare skin.
With the cloth bundled at his feet, he finds the skin underneath mottled, tender. Purples and yellows. He turns this way and that, lifts an arm, winces. The skin on his right side has split, as if sliced by a blade. Mizu doesn’t understand it.
He sighs through his nose, and has to concede the exhale is easier to do, now.
It’s begun to feel as if every breath is shallow, insufficient, no matter how he takes it. As if no adjustment of posture can ease the ache between his shoulderblades, his ribs, in his neck.
It’s as if his body is unwinding in the same way his wrappings have. Unfurling to settle, brittle and ill-fitting. There’s a raggedness to him. A renewed awareness of his body, even if it can be reshaped, even if it is, at times, strong—at other times, it is still, confoundingly, weak.
Perhaps that’s being a man. Perhaps that’s where all the anger comes from.
Perhaps all men stare at mirrors, struggling to breathe and incapable of fixing it.
Mizu studies his half-naked self, the bruised patchwork of his skin, the lines left by the wrappings, and he doesn’t see, so much, the parts of himself he’d rather weren’t there anymore. Only the leftovers of his attempts to hide them.
Raggedness.
It comforts him. Shrinks everything else down to size.
What’s bruises, after all. What’s pain.
He can wear these, as he wears his clothes and his hair and his face.
He can suffer, if it saves him.
////
They visit the market again.
Mizu aches from teeth to navel. His hands tingle at odd intervals. Sometimes when he swallows, he feels as if he’s doing it wrong.
The only solution he can find is the one he cannot carry out.
Remove the wrappings. Return to his cage. Bang against the bars.
Mizu doesn’t know what to do about it.
The market is crowded as ever and the fishmonger from last time greets him with familiarity.
“Still skinny, young man,” he says, tutting at him. “Not enough fish in your order, then?”
Mizu does not tell him that even if there were, he would be unlikely to eat it.
The risk of it doing what the man suggests, of his meals giving him weight, swelling him, softening him, has become too great. He eats modestly. Sensibly, he tells himself. Another practiced discipline, like his voice and his gait and the weights he wears on each limb.
He packs the bundle of fish into the cart and blinks back the black spots in his vision.
Master Eiji returns from another stall, a large bag of rice on each shoulder. He loads both into the cart, then turns to fetch another two, and loads those, as well. Mizu doesn’t remember it being this cumbersome, the last time they did this. He grips the handles to prevent it from tipping. Grits his teeth against the tug at his ribs, the pain in his side. Blinks against it. Tightens his hold. Then it is time to move.
The journey back to Swordfather’s hut is not short.
Partway, Mizu missteps, his foot slipping in melting ice, and he falls, his hands glued to the cart and his leg stretched behind him.
His torso tries and fails to accommodate the sudden shift—his elbows rise to his ears and a shout tears from his throat, loud enough to scare birds from a nearby tree. They flap and scatter, and Mizu groans, slowly righting himself with his eyes squeezed shut. His glasses have slid down his nose. The cart hasn’t tipped. He will not let it.
He hunches over the handles, drawing in air as if breathing through a pinprick in a sheet of parchment.
Forces himself to step again, before his Master can say or do anything that would only embarrass them both.
The cart shifts forward. A fraction.
Mizu sets his teeth and pushes again, harder. His muscles blaze—chest, arm, stomach. He pushes on, with his torso aflame. Tracks a bead of sweat down his front.
Nothing new, he thinks.
Not the first time he has left scorched earth and smoke in his wake.
Somehow he always ends up in an inferno of his own making.
////
At nights, as Master Eiji promised he could, Mizu practices with his sword.
Sometimes steel, sometimes wood, sometimes a bamboo rod of a convenient size.
He steps, swings, swoops. Parries and slices at imaginary enemies. Or not-so-imaginary.
For all his cruelty, Chiaki did teach him one thing of use: when to breathe, and how to do it. An inhale here, a step there; a swing now, an exhale then. That to ignore this is to ignore power, precision. That fluidity matters as much as force.
To work with himself, not against.
The day after the market and the cart, when the sun’s gone down, he chooses a wooden training sword from the rack in the main room and blinks spots from his eyes and takes to the yard behind the hut he shares with his blind old mentor to inhale and swing and go limp, dropping into the mud hard enough to kick up specks of it.
Bested by his own carelessness.
Face-down in the still-drying mud with his hair in his eyes and a sob trapped in his chest like so much air and pain and rage, Mizu pummels the ground with his fist and screams until he thinks he may pass out again.
He stays there, panting, fingers squealched into the mud, and he may as well be gulping in lungfuls of soil, dead leaves, sticks. Caking his insides until he suffocates with it seeping from his nostrils in globs.
Maybe that’s all drowning is—breathing in the wrong place.
He’s not sure if it’s this latest wretched thought, or that while he is half-bowed and crumbling in the dirt, his forehead pressed into the muck, he finds himself staring at his belt—the fabric, the pattern, the waves. The blue.
It was his blanket, when he was a child.
His mother would say, in one of her rare moments of true kindness, that it was beautiful, and that it matched his eyes, as if he could ever dare draw a correlation between the two.
The ocean. That always comforted him. Soothed many an ache.
Mizu spits out a mouthful of mud, and he has an idea.
////
Afterwards, it will bother him that he did not think of it sooner.
The coastline is rocky and white, and the waves roll in heavy, loud, depositing seafoam on the bank of pebbles and broken shells.
The salted air is thick. Mizu breathes it deeply, as if this version of oxygen is easier to draw from than the air he’s accustomed to.
He’s not even gotten his feet wet when he feels it begin to work.
He undresses fast, runs in eager. The bracing chill of the water smacks at his face, skin, bones—awakens him in a way he has not felt for… a very long time.
Then he’s under, the muffled sounds of ocean and ferocity and power flooding his ears, pressing in on him. Surrounding him. Holding him.
His weightlessness is startling.
When did he get so heavy?
With his eyes squeezed shut and his fingers clamped over his nose, Mizu screams into the darkness, shooting bubbles and spit and air into the abyss.
He thinks of burning.
And of drowning.
And he rises to the surface to break through and breathe.
////
It begins to feel like less of a lie the longer he goes on telling it.
A monthly return to the market, the fish monger, the nicknames of lad and son and boy, landing like a pat on the back, leaving a quiet glow in his chest.
A moment on the road between the village and home, passing a traveller with a dark beard and a long coat, who meets his eye and nods, wordlessly, in a way that speaks of recognition, kinship. His cheeks ache, afterwards.
A man visiting Master Eiji seeking a fine set of knives, joined by his daughter, about Mizu’s age, who he catches looking at him with curiosity, all shyness and—if Mizu didn’t know any better—interest. He stands straighter, with her eyes on him. Makes sure to square his shoulders.
And these are just a few of many.
Each more affirming than the last.
He buys more fabric.
Spends an evening not training, but wrapping and unwrapping his torso, over and over and over. He’s figured out a way to do it that doesn’t remind him of a python, slowly curling itself around him until it feels it has won. A way to do it that keeps him flat, firm, all the desirable things, without putting spots in his vision. Finds his strength again.
And again and again.
He will change his chest bindings and grow his hair and wear a scarf around his neck to hide the place his throat does not bulge, and he will lose sight of which of these are a costume and which are a comfort.
Even at the mirror, the illusion seems to fade. In its place… there he is.
Every other day, he submerges himself under the waves and ponders it, made brave by the cold and the solitude and the shelter of the blackness below.
Ruse shifting to reality. That was never the intention.
It’s possible he’s spent so long using one word for the other, the truth becomes disorienting before it feels freeing.
The freedom creeps in, regardless. A spark he could not smother, even if he wanted to.
He never mastered fire, after all.
No need to start now.
////
The next few years, it follows, are something of a controlled burn.
At night, he lies awake and listens to the wind in the trees surrounding the hut.
Sometimes it sounds like the ocean.
Sometimes it sounds like wildfire.
It could be both, or neither.
To Mizu, it is a lullaby, all the same.
////
When it matters—whenever, without exception, it counts—Ringo is the first to notice.
This time is no different.
Another day on the road, on horseback, on increasingly borrowed time, feels like.
Late afternoon, after a morning filled with an old kind of discomfort Mizu has been trying to ignore.
“Master?”
Mizu doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t speak. Waits.
Observant.
Useful.
And fucking annoying.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
It almost sounds like a question.
If it were, maybe it would only be, You’re bleeding, again?
Mizu grunts. Does not check himself. Already knows.
He can feel it, the same place as usual. His right side, midway down. Usually concealed by his arm, his sleeve, his cloak. With his hands out front to grip the reins like so, it must be easier to see.
It’s certainly harder to ignore.
He does it anyway.
“Probably,” he murmurs.
He shifts where he sits. As if an adjustment in posture will assist.
Irritation cuts through him. This hasn’t happened for a while. A long while.
Inhale, and exhale. Pain, and pain.
He’s gone soft, again.
Perhaps the hot springs were a bad idea.
“I can take a look at it for you,” Ringo says. He’s attempting to guide his horse to walk alongside Mizu’s. It is not working. “Do you need stitches? Medicine? A balm? I can make a balm with some root vegetables, and the plants with the yellow-”
“It’s nothing.”
“But… blood?”
Mizu glances at him. His round, worried face. Smirks, even as the slight movement swivels his torso just enough that something in his back pinches.
“Plenty more where that came from.”
////
It turns out to be prophetical, in a way.
His confrontation with the Four Fangs ends, ultimately, in his favour, but also: blood.
Too much of it.
Mizu remembers seeing Taigen approach him.
Remembers raising his sword, ready.
Remembers swinging.
And the way the earth rose to catch him, so much less tenderly than a wave would.
////
The next day does not happen. Around him, maybe. But not to him.
He is burning. Well and truly, this time.
His mind is fire, screams, a hut at the edge of the woods, engulfed.
Being hit, and deserving it.
Being left alone, and deserving that, too.
Do not touch him.
His addled mind can’t place that voice. It barely reaches him.
Flames lick at his skin with the ferocity of a whip crack.
He’s being carried, he thinks. He hopes the person drops him, so he might lie in the snow with his body heat making everything that touches him melt.
He will surround himself in water, as he used to.
Make his own ocean, and see if he can finally manage to breathe underwater.
////
The ability to swim eludes him, as ever.
////
Fortunately, so does the ability to drown.
////
His pants are still on, is the first thing he notices.
His feet are bare, as is his entire torso, save for the wrappings—his oldest companion.
And his hair is out. It brushes his neck, shoulders, back. This, of all other things, makes him feel the most exposed.
Everything he’s made of weighs twice as much as it normally does.
There’s a light somewhere.
He groans.
“Master?”
Mizu forces his eyes to open. Ringo is looking down at him, concerned or hopeful. Or both.
Why is he looming larger than normal?
Oh.
Mizu is lying down.
“Where are we?”
He doesn’t recognise his own voice. But then, that is not so uncommon.
“A shrine, not far up the mountain,” Ringo says. “It was Master Taigen’s idea.”
Mizu feels what singular grain of energy he has drain itself. His eyes fall closed. Tries to remember how to breathe in something other than water or smoke.
Taigen.
A problem for later.
“Your fever’s broken, I think,” Ringo says. Mizu listens to him doing something somewhere on his left.
Where are they?
Right. Shrine.
“How do you feel?”
Mizu opens his eyes again, if only to narrow them at him.
Ringo smiles, sheepish. He’s holding a small dish with something in it.
Mizu makes to sit up, and the instant he even thinks to, his body rebels against him. Pain loops from the gash in his stomach around his side and back to the front. He gasps. Ringo reaches for him, and Mizu bats his stump away, and that hurts more than possibly-sitting did.
“You have been very unwell,” the big man goes on. “I stitched your wound. And have made more medicine, to help you heal. And also…”
Ringo falters with his little dish of paste. Looks between Mizu and it, and back again. His gaze keeps going to the cloth around his chest, dispassionate, and also, worried.
Mizu swallows. Sighs through his nose.
“What?”
“You have other wounds,” he says. “I think your—Your wrappings, are too tight.”
“They are fine,” Mizu says, even as his latest breath tightens the vice gripping his ribcage. His body is beaten, inflamed. He should count himself lucky Ringo did not cut the fabric while he was unconscious. He concedes, a mild correction: “It can wait.”
Ringo opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens.
“I think…”
Mizu inhales, and it goes about as well as it did the first few times.
“You think I should take it off now.”
A silence.
“Where’s Taigen?”
“Gone. Collecting wood, for our fire. He only left not long ago—He should—He won’t be back any time soon, I’m sure. And he does not… He will stay outside. I can make him.”
“You can, can you?”
“Yes. I will.”
Mizu sighs. All this talking.
“Alright.”
He turns his head enough to watch Ringo nod, put aside the dish, rise to his knees.
Mizu makes to sit up again, and the wound in his side pulses as before. It keeps him down. His hand clenches into as tight a fist as he can manage.
“I’ve got you,” Ringo says—that confidence, again. “We’ll just…”
He slides his stump under Mizu’s back, pushes with a shift of his weight. Mizu is upright easily, slumped over himself. Ringo is strong.
Mizu’s vision swims in this new position, and he blinks at it. Nausea rises in him, brief but tangible. A grunt slips up his throat. He swallows again.
“Okay,” Ringo says, quiet. “Do you think you can—I don’t know how you did it.”
Mizu’s eyes flick to him a moment. He’s looking at his chest, the strip of fabric. Studying. Searching. Oh.
Mizu raises his left arm—his uninjured side, at least—and presses his fingers into the seam of his wrappings. Finds the end and tugs it free. It’s sticky with sweat and grime and blood, and doesn’t fall loose the way it might otherwise. There’s too much of it, anyway. It needs to be unwound.
He’s not sure he has the energy for it.
Ringo must figure the same. He offers his stump, the one not still holding Mizu upright.
“Here,” he says.
It takes Mizu a moment. The piece of cloth between his fingers, and the hand—stump—being held out to him. Gods, but he is tired.
Mizu watches Ringo’s face, reaching for his arm with the end of his wrappings in hand, and considers the sturdy leather strap encasing his wrist. Should he ask, first? This is… new territory. Mizu has no map.
“It’s okay,” Ringo says then—cheerful, almost. “It’s what they’re there for.”
Mizu waits a moment, then pokes the end of the fabric into the thick bracelet, tucking the cloth between warm skin and warm leather until the end sticks out the other side. He wants it to be snug. Needs a firm hold.
“Thank you,” says Ringo, when Mizu’s hand lowers back to his lap. “Now…”
In a series of movements Mizu is barely conscious enough to follow, Ringo manages to keep him propped up while he works his free arm around Mizu’s torso enough times that the fabric—filthy, sticky, as predicted—finally falls away.
Ringo pushes the pile of cloth away with his knee, and Mizu is lowered slowly back to his bedroll. He watches Ringo place his stump against the floor, so he can use his other stump to pin down the long end of the wrap and lift his other arm to pull it free from his bracelet.
With that done, he turns back to Mizu.
Who, he realises, has not been so bare in front of anyone, much less a man, for a very long time. Unless you count the hot springs, which Mizu, still disgusted by his own carelessness, does not.
He watches Ringo’s face with as much comprehension as his addled, recently-fevered brain can pull together. Expects his expression to change, somehow. Even minutely. Looks for the evidence of the shift in Ringo’s thinking. The alteration in his mind, no doubt occurring presently—the adjustment, from man to woman.
It does not come.
“Do you mind, Master?” he asks, holding out the dish.
Mizu spends another moment on Ringo’s face.
His ridiculous, round, kind face.
And shakes his head, just slightly.
Ringo doesn’t waste any time. He dips his stump into the paste he’s created, and carefully presses the cool balm to Mizu’s broken skin. His right side. The same place, ever since he was a boy.
It stings.
Mizu hisses.
Ringo does not apologise, and Mizu might be most grateful for that, out of everything.
He works swiftly, without sacrificing gentleness. Mizu has to close his eyes. The way Ringo’s face creases, the way he examines purple skin and red welts before delicately lathering his concoction onto it, is too much. Too tender.
He is being handled delicately, and it is making him feel closer to shattering than ever.
“I think that will do,” Ringo says, a short while later. “But I… I didn’t touch your nipples, so…”
“I’m fine,” Mizu says, sharper than intended. His skin is cooling, soothed. Whatever Ringo has done, it is working already.
Mizu wonders if the dish contains a tiny ocean.
Ringo seems like the type to create such a thing.
////
In the morning, more medicine.
Mizu turns his nose at it. Then downs it in one breath.
“Okay,” says Ringo, like he’s responding to something. “Good.”
Mizu gives him the bowl back.
“How is your stomach?” he asks.
“Fine.”
“Shall I check your stitches?”
“No.”
“Does that happen often?”
“What?”
“Your chest bindings. The bruising.”
“Courtesy of the Four Fangs. Nothing else.”
“You have scar tissue. I saw it. A little. But. It is there.”
“It is old. Hence, scar.”
“There may be other ways to-”
Mizu stands. Slowly, but the movement is enough to halt whatever he is about to say.
“If I ever want your advice on what I wear or how I wear it, I will ask you, and then you must kill me, for that will be a sure sign that I have gone truly mad. Do you understand?”
Ringo swallows. Nods.
Mizu nods, too.
“Good.”
////
Ringo comes to him with fresh paste and an apologetic look, and the routine repeats itself sooner than Mizu had expected.
“We must get you healed and well,” says Ringo. “Master Taigen wishes to duel you. I just want you to feel better.”
“Taigen is a fool,” is Mizu’s response, wincing when his ribs complain again, propped up against the wall, chest bare. “He should have killed me when he had the chance. He should be in here, killing me, right now.”
“Master Taigen is a man of honour.”
“His honour is stupid.”
Ringo giggles—giggles.
“Not to men like him,” he says, still carrying out his work. His stump is pressing, gently, into flesh Mizu has hardly let anyone touch. Mizu finds he does not mind, so much. “Maybe to men like you.”
Mizu watches him work.
Curious.
“And what is a man like me? An imposter?”
“Special,” Ringo says, not looking up. “Many men are born with their manhood handed to them. It is too heavy, oversized, or insufficient. You have crafted yours to be whatever you need.”
“You speak of falsehoods. Disguise.”
“There is no disguise in dressing how you feel most comfortable.”
“Most people would say I’m a woman. And a demon.”
“Because you’re a woman?”
“Because I am white.”
“It sounds like you are part white. And part woman, too. Which leaves lots of space to be other things, as well.”
“Makes no difference.”
“It should. People should listen, when you tell them what you are.”
Mizu would shake his head if he had the energy.
Fool, he thinks. As if it’s truly that simple, from anyone’s point of view.
He wonders what makes Ringo so special, that it is not such a challenge for him.
“Most people think I’m stupid, or not capable of doing many things,” he goes on. “But I know that is not true, because I’m smart, and I have all my tools, and have taught myself new skills. And here I am, with you and Master Taigen, on a quest for revenge, and making soup. I can ride a horse. So, those people are wrong. How could their idea of me mean more than my idea of me?”
“You’re bold tonight.”
“I have been cooking. A lot. I have lots of time to think, when I cook. It is very nice and quiet. One of my very favourite things about noodles, and soup, and medicine. Time to myself.”
Being on your own, you could be like water. Impossible to catch.
His mother’s voice, coming back to him in his frayed state.
It didn’t seem so much like an instruction, at the time, but when Mizu listens to it over again, he is almost certain it was.
It might be the cruelest thing she ever said to him.
“You don’t get lonely?”
“I am my own company.”
Mizu cannot help his frown, at that. He scoffs, even though the action hurts.
“The self is not company,” he mutters, certain. “It is just… passenger.”
Ringo stops with his stump outstretched toward the stitched slit of skin on Mizu’s abdomen, fresh paste on it. Stares off into the distance with his eyes unfocused on a thick wooden beam stretched in the rafters of the small shrine that is their temporary lodging. Stares and stares, still.
Then shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “You are wrong.”
Mizu doesn’t argue again.
He thinks of Mikio, though he tries not to.
Of months and months on a beautiful, isolated farmland, with horses and cherry blossoms, and a partnership, grown slowly over time.
Of nice kimonos, and new ways of wearing his hair, and his genuine excitement—eventually—at becoming someone’s wife.
He sighs, tiring from the conversation, the sting of Ringo’s balm, his body’s attempt to heal.
“Sometimes I’m not sure I know my… idea… of me.”
“Everyone knows who they are, deep down,” says Ringo. “We are the first person we meet, and the one we know the longest.”
Mizu lifts a shoulder. Figures there is no harm in being honest with the man responsible for keeping him alive.
“I have been a man, and a woman. Sometimes both are comfortable. Man, most often. But… I think I am most satisfied when I am using my sword, with an opponent, or without. I am nothing else then, other than a person, doing what I have trained my whole life to do.”
“Maybe it’s like soup.”
Mizu stares at him.
He starts to wonder if all the medicine fumes, the multiple rounds of paste-making, are having a negative impact on his would-be apprentice.
“Ringo. How is it like soup?”
“I make soup with all kinds of things. Vegetables, spices, meat. It depends on what I have available, or how I feel. Whether I am starving, or cold, or hot. When I was learning how to cook, I started with one type of soup, and made only that, for months. And then I changed it, one day. And sometimes I change it back. But it is still delicious. And it is still soup. Don’t you think?”
Mizu is not sure he does.
But he lies awake that night, preoccupied by mirrors and illusions and food.
////
It takes longer than it ought to, but when Mizu wakes in the morning, pained and irritated but somewhat rested, he listens to Ringo’s quiet snoring and the truth of their conversation finally materialises.
He likes himself.
Mizu stares at the dark ceiling, surprised, and ashamed for it.
What reason is there, really, that Ringo should not hold himself with some kind of esteem?
He has no hands, which feels unfortunate, at best, and limiting, at worst, but he has his tools, the wraps around his wrists, seemingly all his own creation, his own design.
He is large, which one could think might hamper him, though it does not; the bell tinkling around his ankle testifies so. He has learned to move with stealth. Hard by any metric, but surely harder by his.
And he is trusting. Eagerly he has hurled himself into the company of a person he thought to be a half-white man on a dangerous quest. Mizu finds this trait the most puzzling, and the most detrimental to Ringo’s overall wellbeing.
What is there to counteract that?
What keeps Ringo safe from the pitfalls of his own poor judgement?
For every other so-called defect, Ringo has found a workaround. There’s a kind of balance to it—set, and offset.
Mizu envies it, even as he wonders at how a person such as Ringo could be so sure a person such as Mizu is… deserving, when Mizu himself does not have faith.
Mizu has not returned Ringo’s gestures—his trust, his kindness, his assistance—and has no plans to.
Nothing within him that he is capable of giving another could possibly compare to what is good and caring within the man bold or brave or fucking stupid enough to follow him into hell.
And to patch him up, when hell follows him out.
////
The day they pack to head to Kyoto proper, it stops snowing, and Ringo finds him on the front step not with a bowl filled with some foul concoction, but a small bundle of cloth.
“This is for you,” he says. “It will help.”
Mizu searches his face for clues. Takes what he’s handed and unrolls it. Not cloth—a garment.
The material is white, the shape reminiscent of his haori, kind of. Arm holes, he thinks. It has a front panel and a back. The fabric is thick, and it gives slightly in places.
Mizu gives up.
“What is it?”
Ringo blushes. Mizu realises he’s never seem him do that before, and it strikes him as odd, given all they’ve been through.
“You wear it,” he says. “For your chest.”
Mizu studies the garment anew. It’s for his torso. Arm holes, yes, and one at the top for his head. It would sit like his wrappings, only resting on his shoulders, too.
He runs his fingers across the fabric. It’s soft.
“You made this?”
“You are on a path of greatness,” he says, like that explains it. Then he adds: “Great men can breathe without bleeding.”
Mizu stares at what Ringo has given him.
Would never know how to explain how, in this moment, he is thinking of an old man, and yellow-tinted glass, and of survival.
That if it weren’t that, it would be something about cracked shells, and waves, and screaming at the bottom of the seabed and the top of his lungs.
He wants to say as he did before.
I cannot take this.
He wants he wants he wants.
“Thank you,” he says, as loud as he can manage.
Ringo’s expression softens. He nods. Goes off to fit his cooking pot into his bag.
Mizu holds the soft fabric between his fingertips, and he concedes that it is possible he underestimated the man humming not three feet away while tidying their campsite.
Which is saying a great deal, considering how much he has come to expect of him.
////
It fits like a glove.
Not a cage, or a costume, or a disguise.
Like a glove, made especially for him.
Probably because it is.
When he’s taken a moment to pull it on—this is difficult, he soon realises—he straightens, stretches. Rolls his shoulders and adjusts the way the fabric holds everything in place.
Breathes in, and out.
And does it again, because he can. Because he wants to.
“Is it okay?” Ringo asks, waiting anxiously by the door.
“You may turn around,” Mizu says, and then, because Ringo deserves more—much, much more—he says, “It is perfect.”
Ringo smiles, at that. Beams.
Useful.
Mizu very nearly smiles back.
He runs his hands down his front and feels that old feeling, the one of hardness, strength. Only this time, absent the element of pain.
Comfort, he realises. He is, in as much as he has ever been, comfortable.
He breathes, and breathes and breathes, and thinks nothing of drowning, or even of floating.
For once, he thinks to swim.