Chapter Text
You’re pleasantly surprised by how much easier it is to bury your mother. The thawed earth is much more cooperative. These last few months have forced winter to loosen its grip on the earth, and now the frost that once chipped the weak iron of your pick has melted into velvety mud. It’s soothing to cut through, and by the time the sun has dipped below the treeline you’ve dug down to your shoulders. This will be good enough.
You can’t summon the tears as you lower her into the ground. The same plague that had taken your brothers, grandfather, and now your mother has also hollowed out your heart. You recall with bitterness all the times your mother had insisted that the forest would always shelter your family. She insisted to her last breath that you and your kin were separate from the village, you lived the old ways and the land would protect you for your piety. Somehow you believed this too, till midwinter, until a fever burned the life from your youngest brother over a single day and a night.
As you lower the linen-wrapped form of your mother into the earth, the truth has never been starker. This world is indifferent to you, and now you are alone in it. You mumble a half-prayer as you quickly shove the mud back into place. The only thing you allow to occupy your thoughts is getting to the river to bathe before the day’s warmth is leached away from the waters.
“Tell everyone hello for me.” You croak as you wipe wetness you pretend is just mud from your cheek.
By the time you trudge into the riverbed, a milky, yellow sky is peering at you from between the trees. You pay it no mind as you tug off your soiled robes and wade into the cool waters. The handfuls of sand you use to strip the dried clay and muck are blessedly familiar and the grating circles you rub into your skin ease a tension from your muscles you weren’t even aware of carrying. Satisfied, you lean back on your knees gazing at the dimming sky as the shallow waters card through your hair. There’s so much you need to do, but right now the idea of forcing your body to rise out of the river just makes you want to burrow deep into the silt. It isn’t until you tilt your head to the side that you notice the bands of red flowing around you. You startle upright and are met with tendrils of dark blood curling around you. Tracing the tide of gore upstream your eyes land on a thicket by the water’s edge..and a pair of feet.
Later you will wonder why you didn’t run. Why the knowledge that you had been bathing in human gore failed to drive you screaming into the mist. But for now your mind is still, and your feet are guided only by a dark and morbid curiosity. Steeling yourself you part the reeds.
It’s a man, and you’re relieved to see his shoulders rise and fall. But that’s about the only sign of life that’s immediately clear. The skin of his broad back is shredded and bloody, and what isn’t stained with mud or red is a sickly grey. There’s no reaction as you move to kneel beside him, the wet sand squelching under your weight.
Gingerly you shake one of the few expanses of untouched skin on his shoulder. “Hey, can you hear me?”
For an uncomfortable while, a grim silence stretches out. Just as you fear you’ll soon have another body to bury he takes a few shallow but deliberate breaths before groaning a response. Whatever he says is too garbled to parse, it’s closer to a whine than any word you know, but at least it confirms he isn’t too far gone, yet.
“Shit ok, I’m gonna get you out of here.” But as you move to loop an arm around his shoulder the reality of the situation falls heavy and hard on you.
He’s huge. A full head taller and twice your weight at least. Whatever muscle you’d built up in the past year balks at the idea of carrying him back to your hut. Shit . You can’t leave him here. There are only a few moments of light left, and you’re not confident in your ability to find your way back here in the dark. It’s clear he won’t survive the night out here either. Cursing under your breath your eyes dart around looking for something-anything that you could possibly use to get him out of here. In the deepening twilight, your eyes can make out some longer pieces of driftwood nestled against the shore. They’re too skinny to support his weight on their own, but there’s an idea already forming in your head as you drag them over to your stranger. You tear your kimono into ribbons and winding them across the driftwood. It’s the ugliest stretcher to ever grace the earth, but the soreness in your hands from ripping up the heavy linen at least reassures you that it will do its job
Even so, dragging him home is slow, biting work. Following the path and keeping your stranger stable become increasingly difficult as twilight dwindles into dusk. Brambles claw at your ankles and the cold night air bites into your damp, naked skin. But whenever your hands falter from the discomfort, letting the litter slip, your passenger’s wince is enough to make you shoulder the stretcher and continue on.
It takes a small eternity before you finally stagger up to the threshold of your little hut. Muscles screaming and palms raw you allow yourself a moment to bandage the blistering skin before you turn your attention to him. In the quivering lamplight, you get a better look at the wounds bleeding sluggishly all across his back and arms. It’s still difficult to suss out blood from caked dirt, so wetting one of your few soft rags you begin scrubbing.
You try to work as gently as you can, but it can’t be helped. Dirt and god know what else has been ground into the deep gashes across his back and shoulders. Whispering a small apology, you wring out the rag and start scouring one of the wounds raking through the skin below his nape. He jerks away from the straw mat choking on a strangled sob, and you’re forced to pin him under you as you scrub. He strings together curses with pleas for you to stop you, but you soldier through further down his back, over his ribs, and hips. Blessedly when you go to rewet your cloth to begin on his shoulders his wailing has ebbed into occasional whimpers.
Without the noise, you can focus on his skin. You can make out a set of marks on his back. Dark lines that don’t bleed or smudge from your ministrations. You draw a blank trying to find an explanation. There are black rings woven onto his biceps and jagged lines splayed over his shoulder blades and chest. The sight brings up a faint memory, something your father had said, a warning. Dabbing at one of the marks takes you back to one of the few evenings your father spent under this roof. He’d rolled up the sleeve of his yukata and made you and your brothers stare at the thick black band inked into his forearm.
This is what shame looks like. All who offend the daimyo or his decrees must bear a mark like this. Do not repeat my mistakes.
You grit your teeth and choke down the bitter memories deciding it best to try to distract yourself with the task of stripping flaking mud from your stranger's face. His features are mapped by ink here too. Delicate strokes under his cheekbones and on his chin emphasize the hard cut of his jaw. He’s got broad features, a wide mouth still pulled into a grimace. You're especially intrigued by his nose, the sharp ridge is bent at a point just below his eyes. Broken, and healed poorly. It makes sense for this apparent criminal to have had a rough life, the wounds you’re tending to are just another piece of his growing collection.
Cleaned and bandaged you take the remaining water and pour it onto his hair, raking your fingers through the strands to dislodge any leaves or clumps of earth. You’re in the middle of admiring the dusty pink the water's revealing when a rough, thready voice pulls you out of it.
“What do you think you’re doin’ to me?”