Chance and Circumstance (scene one)
Another fic snippet! There should be more later. I have big plans.
Fandom: Itsuwaribito, teen rating, warnings for graphic violence/injury descriptions. Alternate universe where Yakuma didn’t have a fortunate encounter before trying to storm the lord’s mansion. (That’s not the only thing alternate about the universe though...) Written mid-May.
Chance and Circumstance, scene one:
“Come closer. You wanted to get a good look, right?”
Yakuma beckons with one hand, the other preoccupied with supporting the sword through his abdomen. Blood coats the metal and leaves it slick in his grip, turning each breath hazardous as the blade threatens to slip. There is so much pain, enough to put a white haze across his vision and cause interference with the focus he needs to keep on his objective. Through it, though, he can still feel the unusual warmth of the blood he’s losing as it runs across his skin and dribbles over his organs. The contrast of the cold metal is shocking, but so is the pain. So is this entire situation.
Yakuma feels, somehow, that he should have been prepared for this. He knew sneaking into the lord’s mansion alone was a fool’s mission, but he couldn’t just walk away from the situation. The risk of failure was one he was aware of, but he hadn’t anticipated being forced to perform some bastardized mockery of surgery upon himself. This itsuwaribito posing as a medicine man is a cruel and sadistic person.
“Don’t try to be clever,” the itsuwaribito says. “That’s not nearly wide enough, is it? Cut a bit more. I want to see what happens when your insides become visible.”
Gritting his teeth, Yakuma tries to get a firmer hold of the sword. He would be dead already, he knows, if this itsuwaribito wasn’t so fond of toying with him. The guns trained on him make that clear enough. As it is, he isn’t likely to last much longer with the way events are going. His best hope is to get the man close and launch a surprise attack against him, but his ability to perform said attack is slipping through his fingers in the form of his lifeblood.
Holding the blade with trembling arms, Yakuma slices outwards and to the side, nicking something internal but managing to mostly keep the cut to a shallower level of skin and muscle. It should look bad enough from where the itsuwaribito is standing. In all honesty, it might be more than Yakuma can afford. He lets the sword’s tip follow its path back to a resting position within him. If he pulls it out now, he will bleed to death without accomplishing anything.
“How’s that?” he asks, blood heavy on his tongue. He can feel it spilling from the corner of his mouth and see it snaking out in rivulets through the lines carved in the courtyard’s stones. Each second reveals more of the spreading pattern. Yakuma has seen a great deal of blood in his life, and he knows when too much is too much. Red has never before looked so jarring, so surreal.
Shifting his grip on the lord’s hair so that the fan presses dangerously against his neck, the itsuwaribito says, “Stop with whatever game you’re playing, boy. You know what’s expected of you.” Eyes crinkling above a twisted smile, he adds, “Finish the job.”
Yakuma feels his severed muscles shifting against each other as he breathes one breath after the next, a cycle of repetition in a countdown he isn’t tracking. Each inhale is sharp; each exhale is a slicing gasp that makes him choke in another desperate lungful. He doesn’t want to die. In this moment, Yakuma wants more than almost anything he can think of to live. He wants to remain alive long enough to see another day, walk another road, visit another town. He wants to heal another person. Heal that one other person. See Lady Kohi smile again. He won’t. Yakuma has been such a fool, rushing in headlong as he has.
“Wait!” the lord cries, shifting and twisting as he begins to struggle in his hold. “Don’t! You don’t even know me, so why? What reasoning could possibly justify you cutting yourself open for a stranger?”
(More than almost anything.)
“Quiet, you!” the itsuwaribito says, yanking the lord’s hair with unnecessary force. “The time for your regrets is past. His end is inevitable now.” Returning his focus to Yakuma, he says, “Hurry it up, or it’s his throat slit.”
From behind the fan, a line of red trails down the lord’s neck. Compared to Yakuma, it’s nothing, one drop instead of the spreading web he’s caught himself as the center of. This is a situation with only one outcome, and Yakuma made his choice when he first closed his fingers around the weapon he’d been thrown.
“If I comply,” Yakuma says, “you’ll let him go? And leave this town?”
“Sure,” says the itsuwaribito. “His usefulness has all but passed, and sickness will do away with him soon anyway. This town has hardly anything left to offer. The most valuable thing remaining is probably you.”
Yakuma nods, resigned to accepting the terms of a liar. There is no way to guarantee the lord’s life, but he has done all he can. Only one action remains to be taken, and if it is the action of a fool, then so be it. Grasping the sword is easier when he thinks of the life he is saving. The pain will be worth it. Squaring his shoulders and resolve, Yakuma lets his attachment to existence flow out with his breath.
Arms tensed in preparation, Yakuma is startled to a halt by an unfamiliar voice.
“What’s this, then?” it calls out cheerily. “Some spectacle, I suppose.”
A boy about Yakuma’s age stands in the courtyard where he hadn’t a moment before, his smile a sliver and his eyes mere slits above it. A strange wind gusts, fluttering his obi, and he tilts his chin up with a lighthearted laugh.
“Look at you, all bloody and uncool,” he says. “Did you seriously cut yourself open? What are you expecting to achieve that way?”
Legs twisted in chains and sword blade held pressed against his intestines, Yakuma’s blood coats his chin as he snarls, “Shut up! Who even are you? Lives are at risk and you think it’s fine to stand there running your mouth?”
The boy’s head turns in a slow sweep of the courtyard, presumably taking in the details of the situation he’s managed to stumble across. His smile should falter in the face of this, Yakuma thinks, but his expression remains unconcerned as he takes in the group of men masked as demons, their leader holding a fan of knives to the old lord’s throat. The masked men shift, muttering to each other as they await the call to take action. Still gripping the lord by the hair, the itsuwaribito stands with eyes narrowed in calculation.
One of the “demons” speaks, asking, “Is that it, boss? Did it work?”
Stepping around the blood-filled lines decorating the ground, the boy comes to a stop before Yakuma and turns his focus upon him and the sword in his gut. Yakuma’s skin prickles under the scrutiny, and for a moment his breath catches, the further lecturing comments dying on his tongue. He wants to hope. At the very least, he wants assurance that the lord will be safe.
“I think it did,” says the itsuwaribito. “You there, pay attention to me over here.”
The boy ignores him, dropping to a crouch by Yakuma’s side. Leaning forwards with his hands resting on his knees, the boy shifts his attention to Yakuma’s face and asks in an easy tone better suited to chatting over tea, “What would you have me do, then?”
“Help, of course!” says Yakuma.
“Help who?” the boy asks, nose scrunching in something like confusion.
“You have to ask?” says Yakuma, incredulous. His vision is turning black at the edges, everything is going cold, and this boy is plunked down in front of him watching him bleed out. “It should be obvious! They have a hostage! The lord needs to be rescued, we need to get to safety, and these thugs need to be taken down!”
In the fading background, the itsuwaribito yells, “You! Don’t talk to him, I’m the one who called you here. Listen to me if you want your reward!”
“Boss, maybe we should let it eat first,” one of the men says.
“Run!” cries the lord. “Take him and run!”
The boy ignores all of them in favor of searching for something in Yakuma’s expression. After a moment spent in silent contemplation, he asks, “That’s what you want, huh?”
Yakuma knows this boy might end up faring no better than him, but the chain trick was probably only set up once. The lord could live. He can hope for the best.
So, selfishly, Yakuma drags in the necessary air to say, “Of course!”
“Here I go, then,” the boy says, smile expanding to something gleeful and predatory. Twisting on the spot, he leaps into motion.
Yakuma blinks, and the next thing he sees is the boy punching the itsuwaribito in the face, sending him flying into a slumped heap several shaku back. The man remains where he has fallen. Dropped in surprise, the lord scrambles away as the “demons” erupt into a state of pandemonium. Some opt to charge the boy, some dither indecisively, and most run for the mansion’s gate.
No longer in their field of attention, Yakuma pulls the blade from his abdomen and sits up, hands clamped to slow the bleeding. Dizziness wasn’t much of a concern while reclined, but of course the increased elevation of his head in relation to his heart sets the world spinning. Once the disorientation lessens enough, he switches tasks to pulling at the tear in his shirt. If he can rip the fabric, he can wrap the gash tightly, and if he can do that fast enough, he might reduce the rate of blood loss enough to survive this situation and recover. The sodden fabric slips from his fingers again and again, and Yakuma resolves to keep scissors in his coat in the future he now has a chance at.
The boy is holding his own, barely winded as he knocks his opponents about. Sharp whistles ring out from by the gate, and… are those police? Yakuma thinks he is seeing police officers rounding up the attempted escapees. Somehow the entire situation has turned around.
The day may be nearly won, but Yakuma is bleeding faster than ever. He watches the efforts of fingers he can no longer feel, then watches nothing as the black finally overtakes his vision.
