a k a n e

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[akanemiura]

Penance

Father,

Miura pride ourselves on a willingness to sacrifice and to do what's right and best with no expectation of reward other than a job well and honorably done. This is the way in which we have carried on for centuries as the stalwart keepers of Hingan peace and prosperity, ever the watchful eyes and ears that keep vigilant for the drums of discord. Our reputation is sterling, our people known as trusted advisors and wardens. We comport ourselves with calm and reasoned poise in times of war and peace alike, a steady hand on the ship wheel while the seas churn. You have guided us all with exemplary wisdom and we would expect nothing less than a paragon of equal discipline to be ready for the monumental task of taking the lead when you deem them fit to do so. As you well know, that person is to be me, your daughter.

It is with this respect for our people and for our legacy that I must submit my official withdrawal from consideration. As you well know, the last year has been one of great change for me, and many lessons that I have taken to learning the hard way. I know I have burdened you with my mistakes and intemperance, and for that I offer my humblest apologies and beg for your forgiveness. I have always had the best of intentions even in my most confounding moments, but I ultimately have not been able to rise to the challenge of meeting everyone's demands and expectations, least of all those of our kin. The weight of leadership is a heavy yoke, one you have borne with dignity, and one whose burden I now see that I cannot take.

I have a family of my own, one that I did not plan but nevertheless must become more for now that I know the implacable love and duty that comes with being a mother. Gensai is born of a samurai and a fiend, and he will be stronger for both, but a Miura he is not and a Miura he will never be. I have searched for ways to make us whole, to fit together disparate pieces that have no business sharing space, and it cannot be done—not while I hang on to a dream that cannot be. I have let my unrealistic dreams and inflexible expectations threaten to destroy his future before he's had a chance to see it, and I will no longer abide it. I will do as you have raised me to and brave what must be done.

Father, you must know how humbled I am that I would write to you so frankly and so vulnerably, how pained I am to acknowledge that the move I must make now is not to hold on, but to let go in order to become who my son needs me to be. We have been estranged for years by expectation, and it was only through your quick and easy love for Gensai that we have been able to coexist in peaceful silence. Perhaps after this final wound has healed, after I have refound peace away from the burning spotlight, perhaps then we will be ready to speak.

Until then,

Your humbled daughter Akane

[akanemiura]

Armory

What good is a weapon whose purpose is to devastate and then shatter? I've lived by my weapon, my only true friend, and each one lasts only a few battles before I discard it for a sharper, untested cousin that will meet a similar end. This terrible blade has a singular function: to cut swift and kill swifter, to race against time to sever the thread of life before the sword itself exhausts its brittle tempering. Duels between samurai are short and brutal to match, but we have convinced ourselves this pace is the speed and efficiency at which all things ought to happen that are worth doing. Revel not in the blood you've extracted with the cleanest cut, but in a job masterfully and effectively done.

The faults within me are as folded as this imperfect steel, the ripples more evident now than ever. I sit in a graveyard atop a mountain of broken and rusted handles with no edges left to bite, cruel mistress and her toothless hounds worn down to the bone. I've dreamt of the warring by which my forebears were forged, I've chewed through plates of armor and pulled my sword from a hilt violently made in the bellies of giants, and for what? For what? Another piece of trash discarded in my wake, another corpse I can use as a vault so I might inch a little closer to this illusory glory that never comes. It follows me like the sun on my travels; I ride for hours, but it continues to burn untouchably overhead.

My son keeps me sleepless with his cries and I'm too burdened to move and fetch him. My dreams of greatness are a mirage that I continue to chase, a lie I've committed to telling him before I knew his face. What can I teach this boy about glory when its taste goes sour on my tongue, when I have to force it down my gullet and pretend it's sweet and satisfying? This child of mine was born into a war of my own making, come about by a hasty mistake rather than careful intent. I fight his father like time hasn't passed, like it didn't ruin lives and rack up an inglorious body count for those caught in our crossfire. The savage is not the one we thought it was: I've lost control.

The night nurse stirs and rises to soothe my son. Her humming comes through the wall as though it's as much for me as it is for him. I dig my heels into the mattress and try to find a way to stop this reckless spiral. It's me, this feeble weapon, this glass dagger, this fucking breakable sword that's lost in a cycle of violent reincarnation. Disarm me, I'm begging you.

[akanemiura]

Prompt #28: Bow

Soft coos and bleats of a bright-eyed baby bouncing on my back make for sweeter songs than the birds trilling overhead to accompany the hike up Little Daitenzan, the big Daitenzan's soft-sloping little brother more suited for mother and baby out for fresh air. I narrate our journey while Gensai eats my ponytail and pulls the loose tendrils from behind my ear; I know he can't understand, not really, but he loves the sound of my voice and I'd like to think that I can instill the intent through timbre and lilt until the time comes that he can speak.

"Your uncle and I hiked this trail when we were coming of age. We'd finish archery or our swordsmanship training and race up the hill to eat our lunch and avoid extra chores if anyone caught us looking idle. Your grandfather was still grey, even then. It feels like he's been old his whole life, but you'll feel the same way about me when you grow up." I can't help but smile at the thought.

The soft soil yields to the press of boot treads, one set of steady tracks dotting the trail up the incline. I feel most honest out here, without the eyes of the world watching my every move, waiting for what the incredible Akane Miura will accomplish next. I don't have to worry about outpacing the next challenger, about staying unbeatable. I can be soft and sentimental when the snapping jaws of encroaching perfectionism recede behind me as I climb and climb. The discontent of a life derailed falls out of view, and for a time I feel like my mistakes were just right. I can trick myself into believing that I never needed any of the things I always wanted, anyway.

"He was older and stronger than me, your uncle, so he would get ahead of me until I couldn't see where he'd gone. I never wanted to admit I was scared, but I was." I feel Gensai flail with my gathered hair clenched in his tiny, doughy fists and let out a delighted gurgle. He's going to be so strong, someday. "Eventually, he'd jump out from behind a tree or from out of the brush and startle me, and of course I'd go running, blinded by my rage. I'd catch up and start battering him with my bokken until we were both laughing, unable to remember how it all started."

The treeline thins as we approach the rocky summit, giving way to crumbled dirt and an expansive vista of the wooded land from which we've emerged. Fifteen years stand between then and now, but the view is ageless and unchanging. I exist in the then and now, momentarily superimposed across time right where I stand. I can feel the echoes of the past as clearly as the caress of the fresh breeze from this high up. This is not what I had dreamed, and yet, it's so much more.

[akanemiura]

Prompt #18: Devil’s Advocate

"Akane, akami," my grandfather used to tease, comparing my angry red face to a bright slice of bluefin in a pun only a father's father could piece together in the face of a young girl's tantrum. It was enough to break my temper and make me laugh, ruining my righteous fury, and though the stakes were lower back then in matters of childish fairness and injustice, what I wouldn't give to have a magical incantation like that to help me now.

Motherhood brought me profound peace, at first, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed since my own mother was still alive and well. The stars turned for us like I was the first and only woman to ever have a baby, and when I looked out, all I could consider was how to compact the infinite inheritance of the whole wide world and all of its potential to fit into my boy's mighty, tiny fist. I even came close to blurting the idea of a second child within a month of the first for desperate want to perpetuate this serenity, and equal fear of losing it. But what started as a thrill of possibility has since narrowed and tightened like a lead rope, like a noose around my neck while I, the stubborn calf, flail against its terrifying pull as though sure I'm headed straight to slaughter. A limitless landscape for the imagination succumbs brutally to reality: my wildest dreams for my son have ripped open a debt of wanting that my own personal capacity and control over the world have no hope of repaying. And still, I fight this losing battle, I obsess over the most minute of things.

It wasn't all that long ago that I used to meditate on making peace with death and failure, courting it close and then moving past the fear so I could remain stoic and rocksteady as a warrior without equal. Now I charge at anything that looks like it might threaten my vision, just a quick slip of red and I'm snarling like I've never known a day of discipline in my life. This incandescent rage passed down through my blood takes over like some accursed lycanthropy, and the brunt of its burden is felt most acutely by his father when I turn it into a weapon against him. We have both taken turns trying to kill each other in the past in a most literal sense, and somehow these spats hurt deeper than any blow by his hand.

I'm so tired, but I don't know how to stop. I can wield a knife with surgical precision because I made myself practice until it was second nature, but I don't know what delicate is when it comes to softer matters and I'm afraid I might never learn. How do I unclench my fists and let go? My son will take after me in ways I have yet to know, but I hope like hell it won't be like this.

[akanemiura]

Prompt #6: Avatar

(Photo source)

Hidden behind the overstuffed trinket carts that litter the narrow streets of Kugane is a second city built under the crush of tourism. This aging old world is marked by sun-bleached doors and creaky screens accessed only by turning sideways and shimmying between towers of souvenir stock boxes stuffed until thousands of tiny, painted pink paws of maneki moogles bob and wave in jaunty asynchrony. Through one particularly ancient portal lies a dim kushikatsu that I steal away to when I'm starved of indulgence, when my steel resolve wavers and what I need is a plate piled high with fried food to cure everything that ails me.

This time, when I slink past the light-streaked screen, I'm greeted with an unusual sight: every seat around the bar full, save for one. It's rare that I see a single other soul sit down when I'm here (and we all agree that eye contact is not an option), and my first inclination is not one of calm acceptance, but to let rage carve a bitter line into my gut until my appetite is nearly surpassed by ire. I was ready to turn and go, to pretend I never liked this place at all, but then I hear it: "Akane. I saved a seat for you." I whirl around, ready to accost the stranger, and what I find is the face of my own brother grinning from beside the last open seat.

I move before I know I'm moving and I speak before I know I'm speaking. "You're supposed to be dead," I remark plainly, stating what should be obvious and somehow is not. I adhere to the rules, even the rules of reality, and yet somehow they find a way to bend for everyone but me. "Why are you here?"

"Because I'm hungry," Gensai deadpans, and try as I might to ignore the sheer audacity of a dead man's appetite, I can't help but grant him a bitter laugh. "Shut up," is all I can muster, reaching for a skewer, and he sinks his teeth through a battered prawn with an audible crunch. He looks so much like a younger version of our father, the same strong jaw, the same unflinching gaze. And I realize that I have grown older and he has not.

"You remember when I told you about this place?" he inquires between bites, piercing my thoughts.

"Yeah, I had to pretend like I didn't already know about it—"

"Because you didn't want me to know—"

"Because I didn't want you to know—"

We both stop and laugh as we speak concurrently, and it's Gensai that finishes the sentence properly. "...That you were out there having a good time while I was preparing for the real, ultimate greatness of carrying on the Miura legacy; blah, blah, blah."

I chew through a flaky bite of fish and nod. "I didn't want anyone to think I was just fucking around. Or that I came here with someone improper. I realize now that I could have just lied, but I felt like you'd see right through me."

"I knew," he admits quickly, a smile spreading fast on his features before he washes it down with a drink from his pint. "I always knew. You had this look on your face. C'mon, kid, I know what a crush looks like and you had a crush."

"Stop," I warn, but what kind of teeth does it have when you're having a full-fledged conversation and meal with a dead man? What sort of information is he revealing when you've had a whole damn baby with that crush and then named it after your brother, the dead man, himself. It's toothless and we both know it. He just laughs, careless.

"It's fine, Akane. It worked out, didn't it?"

We both grow quiet, and for the first time, I take a good look around at the others who occupy this space. They're faceless, nameless, forgettable. The posters and scrolls on the wall are impressionistic smears of color and gesture, a sketch born of imperfect memory. The din of conversation is nothing more than a facsimile to help construct this façade: it's a dream and it always was. Even the waft of hot oil and sizzling meat lacks dimension when I begin to scrutinize too closely.

"My son will know everything about you," I offer suddenly, and I don't know why I feel the need to say so to a figment, but I do. There's a pang that refuses to abate that has no origin and no name; it swells within and fills me with bittersweet ache. Some unspoken conclusion lingers in the air between us in this unreality that I am only just becoming attuned to, and for once, I do not deny it. "I know why you're here. It's time for both of us to move on."

I hear the skewer hit the plate with a wooden plink and before I can turn my head, he embraces me. In a testament to the convincing charade of this liminal place, the first thing I feel is embarrassment. "Please," I begin, momentarily protesting such a personal display amidst a crowd of strangers, and he interrupts me before I can go on. "They're not real," he murmurs, and I turn to throw my arms around him in return.

When I wake, I feel a weight lifted. He's gone and my son awaits.

[akanemiura]

Prompt #3: Scale

My son and I, a phrase that I still hear myself speak to life with awe, sit shoulder-to-shoulder with my aging father and watch the ships cut seamlessly into the harbor on perfect glass waters. Genjiro clutches his cane between his knees and stares off in our shared silence, the only way we know how to honor an uneasy truce that has stretched on since the night I slipped in like a thief to break his heart and mend it in the same bittersweet gesture. When his grandson was still just a notion, a concept that had yet to take his first deep breaths of air, it was easier to worry after our future. His father, a fiend, an outsider, a blood traitor. It was never supposed to be like this, centuries of honed tradition funneled into his last child's reckless destiny, but now this boy with the most perfect, dark curls stands testament to both stalemate and peace between samurai and honorbreaker, our past and our future. He straddles a divide that I have struggled so hard to bridge, and now I couldn't imagine a moment without him. Since he came to be in my arms, I feel the scorching rage I hold like a hot coal quelled, if only for a moment.

The fresh sea breeze twists my hair and sends a plump-cheeked baby's face searching for the source of such sorcery. I watch the curiosity spark fire in his amber eyes as he searches me for answers, mother held on the scale of gods for a boy so small. It used to be that I never held a smile for long lest it upset the delicate balance of burdens piled high on my back, but now my face hurts from excess. And when I glance over, I see my father watching the boy named for his slain son, and I see his wizened mouth recrease faded lines that had fallen into disuse for years.

He meets my gaze and holds it, unflinching. We share a smile.

[akanemiura]

hi!! so my main blog isn't ff related and I don't wanna bother my followers with it lol but I just wanted to say that your writing is absolutely spectacular

You're so sweet! Thank you very much, I really appreciate you taking the time to say so, this kind of stuff always makes my day 😭 My full writing tumblr is @strigwrites if you didn't know already!

[akanemiura]

Mother

CN: Violence, war, death

I think about the face of the Garlean captain whose head I took, whose weathered countenance I studied for weeks through a pair of binoculars before I collected the mortal toll. I got to know her penchant for leaving her station to enjoy a clandestine cup of coffee just before the molten eye of morning peeked over the horizon, and I made sure it wound up being her last-ever indulgence. I can still smell the bitter black, untempered by milk or sugar; not even our enemies had the luxury of softer stuff in the wages of war. I never saw it spill when she slumped forward, a marionette clipped from its strings, but I think about the last sight before I stole away in the last hazy minutes of dawn, her head rolling across the dirt with the smell of a strong brew still lingering on her mouth. It couldn't have been more than ten months past that I tore that bloody path.

And it was nine moons ago that I pulled a frightened reaper pilot from the hatch like child from womb. His craft, now kneeling, could no longer make him a fearsome thing with a metal skeleton and flashes of light. I handled him so roughly that his helmet tumbled and bounced on the twisted metal just a moment before I ran him through on my unslakable blade. He was a boy of barely nineteen who must have been proud rather than chagrined by the need to shave for his military post, as it meant he could finally grow the facial hair at all. It was my last act before the warships came and turned the sky against us all.

But now, now I watch myself grow bloated not like wartime corpse, but as warrior made mother, one new identity moving in before the last could vacate. I'm left in the undignified state of having my pants halfway down my legs, both as a metaphor and as a misery when I can barely reach them at my ankles for weight of child I was unprepared to welcome. I think about the Garlean soldier whose arm was taken clean at the joint by my uncanny cut, how his mother grew that arm, how I now give life and limb to the one I hold within. I wonder if she felt the same ownership I feel now, the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood. When she imagined protecting him, could she ever have pictured it was to protect him from a woman, no, a mother like me?

[akanemiura]

[akanemiura]

"Miura, are you awake?"

"I am."

"We have some news from the healer. I'll let him tell you"

Control has been a lifelong pursuit of an elusive beast for this impatient hunter. I've done everything to have it: eat well, but never too much; find discipline in pouring tea when what you really long for is your sword; find peace in your sword when what you really long for is a warm cup of tea; swallow pride, exhale temperance; make kin of death, invite it to your door, and then move past it. I have climbed mountains and city walls, felled giants with a fluid stroke of my blade, tasted the tang of their blood and let it bathe me joylessly in their fall. I have painted a target on my back as the greatest there is, and now--

"Am I going to die?"

The medic smiles down at me, which is strange, I think, given my state. The charred-earth musk sticks to my pores, has woven itself into the fabric of my uniform; their warships became as common as cloud cover, and this is my souvenir for undermining their presence. As though any amount of personal preparation could have made me ready to raise my sword against missiles and gunfire from the heavens, a trait that is just so deeply, painfully me. Here it is, another quart of rich Miura blood given to foreign soil, my legacy becoming part of the patchwork landscape on this star. My essence sprouts clover, starts a fresh crop. Who stood a chance under weapons such as those? Not even the greatest, not even me.

"No, but you have a reason to live."

"Thanks, but I don't need help with that."

"Think again. We gave you a thorough scan when we were drawing out the shrapnel, to see if we had missed any smaller fragments. What we found, Miura, is that we missed one in particular." He pauses, pleased with his metaphor. I feel the hate rise in my belly— "You're pregnant. Have been for a little while now, by the look of it."

Oh.

I remain calm, but the surface is as thin as skin on warm milk. Not far below lies a seething magma floe shifting serpentine, waiting to explode, waiting to bury villages and lay waste to lush landscapes in its rage. Nothing but charcoal and cinders when this untamed beast that has been my familial inheritance is allowed to roam free. I stare at the overcast (if it's smoke or cloud, the difference is no longer worth finding) and I let them leave me with pleasantries I don't hear, but I know their glances are cast backward to see what comes next. I touch my belly like it's the scene of a crime. I breathe in, how easy. I breathe out. I breathe in, it's fine. I breathe out. I breathe in, I can control this. I breathe out. I breathe in, what in the hell am I going to do about this. I breathe out. I breathe in, what am I going to tell my father, shit fuck I have a husband, too; shit, can I lie about it, will it look like him, will it be obvious what I've done, am I sure, am I sure-sure, it is so hot in here, do they know how hard it is to recover when it feels like this medical tent is set up ten fulms inside Ifrit's fiery asshole—

--

A lone samurai exhales a breath she forgot she was holding as she stands at the bustling docks of the Doman Enclave, shielding her eyes from the sun. She's already come so far from the smoldering battlefield, but there's just one more voyage before she finds herself back in her own bed. Two ships bob patiently in the water, as though they too are unhurried to leave the warm drench of sunshine that soaks the settlement. A fresh wind picks up her ponytail and twists the ends of her sash on playful fingers as the dockworkers skirt around her edges, too preoccupied to do more than offer a passing glance before they're back to rolling barrels across the planks. They are blissfully unaware of the precipice upon which they all stand, the tilting platform that hangs precariously in the balance.

Much has changed since the liberation; she had been standing on a hillside and watched this place burn, but now it stands of its own volition, prideful and gaining. There was someone there with her, too, back then. And though his company was complicated, for now, it is as easy as turning left instead of right.

[akanemiura]

And you know that I'd swing with you for the fences Sit with you in the trenches Give you my wild, give you a child Give you the silence that only comes when two people understand each other

[akanemiura]

Nightingale

To listen, fine; not to listen, fine too... nightingale

- Chiyo-ni

To know my mother, I stitch her together from stolen glances, like a predator cat whose eyes I must never meet. I make a crude construct out of imperfect memory and the myths she left behind; and this poem, patched together from tatters after it was rescued by her from its watery grave, is one of the pieces I linger on most. In my imagination, I am mother and daughter and we read the lines together, feel the weight together, and reflect on how we, the yearning duet, live these words together in a world that struggles to keep us together.

The crowning jewel of my mother's achievements stands the test of time inside a museum in Bukyo, where waterlogged scraps of paper bearing timeless poetry have been preserved under glass to keep the last of their salt-spotted words from disappearing all together. Rie knew of the shipwreck that took the priceless scrolls under the waves of the Ruby Sea some fifty years before and never did get them off her mind. She used her voice to appeal to the bakufu for assistance through polite, but firm letters and was politely, but firmly refused; the funds for such a seemingly frivolous endeavor simply did not exist in a year when the harvests were lean. It could have been the end of the line for this dream of hers, and yet she was undaunted. She traveled the islands and ingratiated herself to the clans who could not figure out what to make of the tan woman with a bow slung across her chest, who offered to chase out bandits and shovel shit for a chance to speak with someone in charge. Read this, she would tell them, reeking of labor but having the eloquence of education, and pulled out the little chapbook of haikus she kept in her breastpocket. This is our culture, our pride, she appealed, and when the sweeping rhetoric of national treasures could not put a light in the eyes of the lords and ladies, it was: Sell it to someone who wants a rare treasure and feed your vassals. Pay for the new wing of your home you've been wanting. Please just save it before the seawater claims it forever. And when she heard the last Thank you, but we simply can't, she forged ahead and took to the seas. She mended sails and cooked in slanting galleys on violent tides before a ship of Confederates agreed to trade her labors for a shot at resurrecting a graveyard of treasures. They say she led the dives in grueling sixteen and twenty hour days. When pressed as to why she was working so hard, she said she was simply too excited to sleep.

It was at the state celebration in honor of her successes that she caught the eye of Genjiro Miura, a man who had sown his wild oats with several wives of yore and had finally grown ready to take the lead from his own aging parents for good with a sense of quiet dignity and stoicism. As I understand it, this was not always the case; in fact, he was once like my brother Gensai, perfectly illustrated by a story told to me by my grandmother whereupon he got ripping drunk with my aunts and uncles at a wedding and shot a flaming arrow at a pile of manure they'd laughingly shaped like an ass. I would never tell him I know about his secret life before the tribulations of leadership permanently bricked over his smile, but I'd like to think my mother saw the laugh lines around his eyes and knew there was more to find under the surface of a much-older façade. My father was another of her deep sea diving projects made manifest as a man whose children she would come to bear.

The slab in the Miura cemetery, at the foot of Daitenzan in the foothills that spread out from the mountain like slender fingers, is inscribed Kudou Rie, and I say it aloud when I come to sweep her grave and clean its carved face. I was lucky to be given life by the woman who dove into shipwrecks and hunted Doman tigers, handed down a wild spirit from on high before she settled into the tribulations of compacting all that fire into two children who never truly figured out how to cage it. I was carried by a legend, made to lay her to rest, and the bellows of her memory blew the coals in my belly into a furnace out of control. When she began to slip away, she refused to let us watch her wither; rather, she told her children a story in the only way a Miura woman can. She held my brother and I close and whispered that she had made the prideful mistake of dueling another samurai who was, in fact, a willful and jealous spirit gone on a rampage. Rather than admitting defeat when she bested it in combat (of course she had), it crawled inside her mouth and sickened her soul, leaving her bedbound in spite of our care. I am still fighting, she reassured me. And we don't fear a proper fight, do we? We do not.

It was, in fact, a case of seafarer's lung rot that had come about from one final treasure dive taken after my brother was born. She had been tamed for too long and she hungered for the salt air and twisting depths of days gone, just one more ride on the rollicking ship where she could revisit the past. I wish she had just swallowed that longing the way I have forced myself to my whole life. I know the pain of eating your pride, I know the gnawing that comes with being undernourished by your discipline, by the world that demands it. And yet here I am, newly-married, setting out once more for the warfront to emulate the boiling warrior's blood that has carried my lineage across time, and we have yet to even know each other as husband and wife. My father watches me depart not with pride, not with sadness, not with disdain; rather, he sees me with recognition of a kindred spirit who is sinning the way he knows all too well. When I leave, he knows I don't care if I come back.

[akanemiura]

"Self-Portrait," Faye Hsu

[akanemiura]

Kith and Kin

(Art source)

I don’t need to see him in the dim of the izakaya to know his eyes are on me from the second my shadow slips through the door. It was years and yesterday that I shared round after round with my older brother and his comrades on the first night I’d ever truly gotten drunk, head spinning with shochu and beer and the bawdry hooting from a cadre of samurai who, for once, bore no responsibility nor expectation save for how to get their sagging bodies home at the end of the night. Tonight, it sleeps soundly under the quiet patter of rain and the sharp sizzle and spit of cooking meat, a mere shade of its former days full of life and laughter. Aged, like we have.

My father has a drink waiting for me, but not so much as a fond ‘hello’. He leads instead with an observation: “It’s cold tonight,” he murmurs. “Spirits forfend a bad crop this year after all we’ve been through.” I want to laugh, but it’s strangulated in my throat. Our family thrives on the sponsorships given to our children, eats on the coin of lords and ladies who stake their claims on young Miura as living status symbols they can post at their gates for the world to see. As our numbers have dwindled in times of stability, as tradition has broken with the steady march of time toward a future that does not need us as it once did, so too have our coffers dwindled. My father does not know that the savings I collected through the same blood and subterfuge he declared too ignoble for our name has been filling our bellies and protecting our way of life from the stampeding boots of progress that would see us made redundant. After all we have been through? He’s not wrong, but oh, how he is.

“Have the scores of admirers knocking at your door worn out your words such that you have none left for family?” he jabs, and it’s then I realize I have been silent and sullen for far too long, lost in my bitterness.

“No,” I begin sharply, then stop myself before I can go in on him with daggers out. It’s not right, this ceaseless war between us. We’ve bloodied each other and retreated in shame so many times before, father and daughter sharing the same intense umber gaze, the propensity for causing pain, the motion through life carrying unique and untreatable dissatisfaction. I don’t have the heart tonight. “I’ve just been thinking. Gensai and I used to come here.” Before I can stop myself, I say the words I’ve been dreading to hear made real by saying them. I can’t tell what drives this desire to show my soft underbelly here, in this moment. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe it’s just too fucking quiet. “I’ve been missing him a lot lately. It pains me to be here without him.”

Our eyes don’t meet. How can they? I feel sick to my stomach, my sour gut given more rot by the ale I wash down my gullet. I remember a time when he found me grieving at my brother’s graveside in the solitude and silence of midnight, long after the lanterns in the compound had been snuffed. Maybe he was embarrassed that we both had the same idea. What do you know about losing a son? he had demanded to know, picking me up under my arms, surprising me with the strength he still possessed so easily at his greying age. Maybe it was his own grief that gave him the strength to shake me once he dragged me to my feet. What do you know about burying your child? Nothing, nothing, nothing... Even now, I sense what he wanted more than anything was to embrace me, but the gulf was too great, the inclination to hide his wounds too drilled into him as it had been me, the sins passed from hand to hand to hand across time.

He finishes his glass while my vulnerability lingers unanswered. I miss him, my brother, my protector, my best friend. I struggle to rise in his place, I smolder with unabating anger. I can’t take the words back and now he knows without question this weakness that still resides, still flares with discontent when I’m reminded that time marches forward without its best soldiers once they’ve gone. I search him for answers and find only unrest; the same hands that taught me to wield a blade now grow gnarled and spotty, and his proud gait has sagged forward year after year as though his withering branches have simply become too heavy. When did he get so old? “Father—” I begin, not sure of where I’m going or what will come next, but he holds a hand up for my silence. And I, his errant child, his seething daughter, his warring blood...for once, I oblige.

[akanemiura]

Peace

Genjiro’s eldest daughter took the long way home, over rough waters and through meandering paths threading between towering stone peaks in the karst lands of Yanxia. The wagon caravan carried her aching bones toward the last harbor before Kugane, and she savored the peace on her back with her hands folded over her ribs as the sky sizzled vermilion into twilight overhead. The low, persistent rattle of wooden wheels on packed dirt had lulled her into a sense of complete placidity, and as they passed through a field of gladiolus stretching hungrily toward the last rays of dying daylight, the acrid tang of war that still singed her nostrils was, at once, replaced with serene and drifting floral. It was here that she had seen mass graves and broken families too shocked to do so much as weep for the ones they buried. The contrast gave rise to a curious sort of optimism that she was promptly denied access to contemplating.

“You alright back there?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

The man’s curious glance turned forward once more, but his tone remained unsatisfied by her response. “Wounds aren’t weeping anymore?”

“Dry since the last change. You said to rest, didn’t you?”

“Ah, I did, I did. Were you asleep?”

She couldn’t help but respond with a scoff, eliciting a chagrined laugh from the man in turn. “...Yeah, alright. Sorry,” he conceded. He seemed content for the barest moment to let the conversation die with his apology before he couldn’t help himself but to press. “...It’s just you’ve been quiet since we left the Front. If I can be honest, it’s a little unnerving.”

“What’s to say?”

“Well,” he began, drawing out the word for several seconds. “Are you excited to get back home to your family?”

A beat passed before she offered a mild assessment. “I look forward to telling them of my accomplishments.”

“They must be pretty proud.”

“Mm. They should be.” Before the thought could linger, she pressed on. “My father’s wife had a baby while I was deployed. I’ll meet my half-brother or sister.” She paused, a deep frown slowly sending ripples through her serene expression as the remembrance dawned on her. “Shit. I forgot to bring a gift.”

The man laughed lightly, in his easy way. “I think they’ll understand that you’ve been busy, huh?”

“My father’s relentless. I’ll have to think of something before I get back or he’ll take it as a slight.”

“He’s gotta be getting on in age, hasn’t he?”

An eyeroll precluded the next. “Old men will scatter their seed until their tools cease to work,” she remarked flatly, finally conceding defeat to her attempt at rest and pulling herself with a grunt into a seated position to see out over the swaying stalks of flowers at their flanks. “I know a man who has something like fourteen children over...seven? Eight wives? I can only guess how many more he’ll sire before someone finally puts him in the dirt. Knowing the whims of fate, he’ll live to a ripe, old age with a full village all related to him.”

A louder guffaw escaped unbidden, frightening a handful of hidden birds out of the brush at the side of the road. The wagon’s occupants both tensed, breath held fast in their tightened chests in expectant silence until the beating of wings was lost in the distance. When the ripple had passed, the driver was the first to laugh, albeit absent his usual careless note.

“...Ah...well, uh...I guess you’re awake now, huh?”

He had nearly turned his head to look back when the silence dragged on just a second longer than expected, but the response came through a lump in her throat she was struggling to swallow whole. “...Wide awake. Yes.”

[akanemiura]

Prompt #15: Ache

My father’s last words to me before I set out in my older brother’s footsteps were not to return home until I had something to be proud of. I set out from home with a sense of stiff determination, but not so far under the surface, I admit that I was screaming. You have to understand that I’ve got a track record of excellence that half of these feeble little invertebrates that call themselves adventurers in Eorzea couldn’t dream of touching with a ten fulm pole.

Under the cloak of night, I aided in the liberation of Doma and fed the soil with enough Imperial blood to start a healthy new crop for the free men to eat. I’ve served, entertained, guarded, drank with, laughed with, and bled for lords and ladies, ambassadors, politicians, minor nobility, and celebrities alike. I’ve restored villages, brought peace to common folk, sought bloody revenge on behalf of weaker men, even got on my hands and fucking knees to scrub shit and blood and vomit off of the floors of clinics that were overrun by the flux.

I would never tell you I’m tired. A return home would not signal a retirement from my duties, but a celebration of what I’ve done and what I can yet do. I would be able to see my grandmother and play music at her bedside. I could greet our servants who have known me since I was still wielding a bokken in the training yard and give them the gifts I’ve scoured from far and wide, all the places they’ll never go. I could field a hundred questions from younger cousins about where I’ve been, about my acts of heroism, and eventually to why I’m unmarried, who I have a crush on, and when am I going to have a baby of my own? I’d wrestle at least two afterward until we’re all breathless and laughing.

Instead, I climb the outer walls of the Miura compound in the dead of night and make my way through my childhood home like something worse than a stranger. I walk the rooftops and dodge the lanterns that move below me; I am a shadow, a ghost, I do not exist until I’ve earned the right, and the family cemetery seems the right place for just such a woman. It’s a beautiful night by any standard and the full moon casts a pale glow that touches his name carved into the stone: Gensai. I take out a rag and clean the engraving with a dutiful touch. I pull weeds, I sweep dirt as best as I can, but this denial, this impassable chasm simply cannot last. I feel nothing.

[akanemiura]

Oh Can't anybody see We've got a war to fight Never find our way Regardless of what they say How can it feel this wrong? From this moment How can it feel this wrong?