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cog_nomenI know this has been a terribly long time in coming, but it comes to me in fits that suit it's own schedule. Somedays, I'll find the inspiration for it so nagging that it won't release my mind until entire scenes have wound their way through my mind with the key words that I want to highlight the use of. Then weeks will pass with me adding only a sentence or two at my liesure.
I apologize that it's a horrible mishsmash of pairings, some of which I am probably alone in enjoying.
Anyway.
Fandom: Samurai 7
Pairings: Katsushiro/Kirarara, Kirara/Kanbei, Kanbei/Kyuuzo, hints of Kanbei/Shikiroji
Rating: NC/17 for M/F
Words: 2735
Kirara wasn't there when Katsushiro finally managed to surprise his sensei in spar. She had to rely on a secondhand telling from Shikiroji, who seemed more than slightly amused by the whole thing. Kanbei had entered the spar with his usual detachment - parry and block, criticize and praise in the same non-tone he used for anything he was uninterested in.
Katsushiro, growing sly with the same sort of foxish instincts that Kanbei had, waited until the last minute to throw in the new move he'd been practicing. His sensei barely parried it, too used to the gap in skills between them. Both swords took a nasty nick, impacting with more force than either expected, warriors sliding quickly apart in a rush of quick exhales at the near miss.
"Katsu-noji was grinning when he started the move," Shikiroji said, his Yari braced over his shoulder and a smile of his own turning his features merry. "But it disappeared awfully quickly when he realized he'd actually surprised Kanbei-san." Shikiroji laughed.
"They both walked away very quickly. I think you'll hear a lot of sharpening tonight."
Katsushiro wore a dazed but smiling expression for the rest of the day, lost in thought even when Kirara approached to bring him his lunch. He smiled more brightly for her, and ate in silence.
His sensei disappeared for the rest of the afternoon, leaving Shikiroji standing guard alone over the rice fields. Shikiroji did not complain, but he did seem grateful for Kirara's company during dinner.
"When we were younger," He reminisced, "Kanbei-san was almost as doe-eyed as Katsu-noji." He confided the knowledge as if it were a secret, revealing Kanbei's unspoken past as if in revenge for being left to stand alone in the cooling evening. "Sometimes I wish we could go back to our youth."
The sound of sword scraping on stone interrupted their conversation. Shikiroji winked at Kirara, and let her go. She tried her best not to let her feet rush, to push the door open casually. There he sat, working the sword back and forth over the whetstone with slow, patient deliberation. He didn't look up when she came in, and didn't protest when she settled down beside him to watch him work. The quiet, his steady presence, and the slow rasp of metal on stone were like a soothing song for Kirara - a lullaby that she had learned to take comfort from when what she really wanted could not be had. She let her mind wander. It brought her back to the one question she was always dying to ask.
"How did you know?"
"I observe." Kanbei replied, softly.
"When the battle finished, you sat by my side." He said, his eyes traveling the blade of his sword as if it were a traitor to him. He worked at the nicks on the blade, pressing it firm against the whetstone, his shoulders taut with the smooth motion. "When the snow started falling, you were still there." The blade scraped softly, a sound that soothed her more and more.
"When I hear you sharpen it, it reminds me that you're there." She said, watching. Smiling.
He looked up, eyes weary, but the motion did not stop. The nick was persistent, but he more so.
"No bandits will come this year." He said at last, straightened. The nick was almost gone.
"You'll go too." She said. Kirara could feel the corners of her eyes turning moist, squinted against the tears and turned the corners of her mouth up in what felt a desperate snarl. She smiled. "Promise you'll come back when you get hungry, Kanbei-san."
He looked at her again, really seeing. His eyes caught the faint light from the lantern, reflected tiny pinpricks of brilliance back at her, as he studied her. Sized her up. Kirara felt brave in that moment.
"Please, can't we just...?" Kirara didn't know what she wanted.
"I'm too old for you." He said, not unkindly. She seized his hands, and he did not stop her. Age had little to do with the statement - Kanbei was nearing fifty, but aging well. Kirara was not even twenty yet, though he had never asked her age. "I'm ready to die, and you are just beginning to want so badly to live. It would bring only sorrow for you."
"Someone should be sad for you - really sad for you, Kanbei." Everyone saw his value, but no one saw who he was. It was hard to say these things. She'd been told to do her best, and he had denied her even before she could say it.
It was impossible for her to give voice to her true emotion. She found her hands bunched together around tight clumps of thick cotton. Her skirt tangled and twisted around sweating fingers as she tried to wrench the words out, simply to have them said. As if that would release the tension, causing everything to unravel like so many strands of homespun. "I-"
The samurai killed her words with a look. They died, unrevealed assassins of voice perceived and calculated before they could spring forth in ambush. She realized only after her words failed that his hands were easing hers gently free of their fabric vices.
"I am out of love." Kanbei explained, the flowers on the backs of his hands wilting with the softening of his grip on Kirara's hands. "A samurai must love his comrades, love those who have given their lives so that he may live," His hesitancy said that most of his love had gone to that. "He loves an enemy who is noble and capable."
"Kyuuzo." She said. How very close she had been - he'd had love in him still when they'd met, if only she'd been more sure of herself. She reached out anyway, touching the scar on his neck. It still felt warm and new, the reknit flesh soft and vulnerable. In time, it would stretch and grow hard like a proper scar.
After a while he said, "I can't let him wait because I am tied." His voice was low and soft, she could feel it under his skin when he spoke, the soft shift and pull of muscle in his jaw. Her hand slid down his neck, tracing the line of scar, cord of muscle. It outlined the jut of bone under loose clothes and armor selected carefully to stay out of his way. It defended poorly, but he would make up for it with skill he kept from being unburdened. It slid easily aside.
His chest was a wreck of scars. Kirara pulled back, her fingers hesitant over the corded flesh. "What happened?" She whispered, this wound unfamiliar to her.
"A castle fell on Shikiroji." Kanbei said. "Only, it hit me first."
Shikiroji had lost his hand - this wound on the samurai's chest was large enough for his heart to have been torn right out. But it was probably only the last in a long string of wounds that had destroyed him. He'd believed Shikiroji dead for a long time, he'd said once. He was the one who had died. She pressed both her hands to it, assured herself of the steady pulse beneath, warm and slow and vital.
He put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her away very gently. When he looked into her eyes, his were deep - emotional, almost. The pupils were wide, glassy. His breath was serene, but faster. "If you dive into tainted water, you will carry that taint with you." He said, voice rough. She was affecting him, and she'd never seen him be affected. Like everything about him, it was beautiful. "You'll pollute the water you touch in the future."
She leaned up, closed the hungry distance between their mouths. Filled it up with kissing, her tongue assertive on his lips until he gave in. It tasted clean, she thought, not polluted at all. Her hands sank into his hair, soft like ripples in a stream. When the kiss ended, she said, "I'm so thirsty, it doesn't matter."
She leaned, and pulled with her hand holds, and he gave easily. He braced against the wall, pulled her into his lap. Pursuing, she settled over his thighs - he seemed almost smaller when she was so close to him, her seated in elevation. It was strange for her to sit higher than him. She turned her mouth in, caught the scar that her fingers had been playing over. She put her mouth on it and sucked hard - felt Kanbei tense up and a soft noise ground from his throat. Somewhere inside she felt triumphant for getting him to react at all.
His hands bunched her skirt up at her hips, pushing the soft red and blue fabric up over her thighs with surprising care. His fingers sought out the junction of her thighs while she worked hard at his neck, careful of her teeth. She focused her attention on the scar that Kyuuzo had given him, so that if a mark was left it would be less noticeable. When his fingers touched her center, she gasped. Her mouth broke contact with his skin wetly, with a soft noise. His touch, deft, was soft as the petals tattooed on the backs of his hands. Coaxing, he stroked his index finger back and forth along the center of her folds, bringing a soft, velvet pleasure to her. There was no roughness to his hands - either the gloves or his own skill saved him from the callouses that marked so many Samurai apart as uncivilized.
Sensation folded her nerves into a tight bundle of attention, his fingers growing wet with contact, turning their motions into a silky, delicious slide. Whatever Kanbei could be accused of, inexperience and incomposure were not part of it. Her body tried to curl into the touch, her hands sliding down his arms from his shoulders to his elbows, gripping, encouraging. She found her face in his hair, her chin resting on the junction of his neck. His hair was cool from the air, and smelled clean and aqual to her. When his fingers were slick enough for his liking, he shifted his hand.
Kirara's attention centered on the slow, pulling burn of his attentions, her own voice surprising to her ears. Kanbei made a soft noise against her neck, and she hushed herself. Sensation pulled her attention inward, her inhales easy but her breath struggling to go back out again as if drawn center wards toward his touch. Her fingers snaked between them unbidden, pushing labia aside to keep his touch centered. Focus narrowed into a hushed, burning bud of pleasure, muscles tensing. Her body curled inward, hips arching faintly in rhythm to his caress. On the verge of pain, it bloomed.
Pleasure spread through her body, her spine pushing erect and then backwards, her fingers loosening their grip on his arm at last as orgasm blossomed through her nerves. It faded slowly, and she sagged in his lap, her mouth pushed tight against the junction of Kanbei's shoulder and neck. Her jaw ached, and she unlocked her teeth from the layers of fabric between them and his flesh. Her hands slid up, pushed at the robes covering his chest before he caught them.
He pulled her close, ran his hand through her hair once, upsetting her already unseated headpiece. "Sleep," He told her, his voice rough at the edges.
Kirara's body told her that it was a fine idea, drowse overtaking her senses. It was her mind that rebelled at last, assuring her that this was not all that she wanted. Bracing her hands on his chest, she pushed herself up, shaking her head. Before he could protest, she started to push aside the layers of fabric he covered himself with, hands discarding armor and at least two layers of linen before they contacted ready flesh. His hands came down to seize hers, but she refused to be dissuaded. Her fingers moved under his, coaxing, until his hands fell away to his sides, and he let his head loll back in surrender.
Accepting his defeat, she pushed herself forward, put one hand on his shoulder to steady herself. The other stayed between them, guiding, as she pushed himself onto his length. With her in control, she felt very little pain as she broke her barrier on him. There was a sharp, deep tearing, and then it was done. She caught her breath, found his gentle hands on her hips when the stars left her vision.
Motion came naturally, she pushed and rocked, he did too. Neither made a sound, she grit her teeth around the pain until it faded, then her jaw went slack. The feeling that overtook her this time was more quiet, it crept rather than crashed, overtaking her senses softly, taking her conscious mind away. She floated as she felt his pace intensify, then hot semen sliding down her thighs. She didn't see his face as he came, but after, as he pulled her close enough for her to hear his racing heartbeat underneath the scar that should have let it free, his expression was composed.
After, Kanbei slipped out of her grasp while she lay soaking in her thoughts and the wet patches in her robes. He claimed his sword from it's place by the whet-stone and stepped past her through the door that admitted only the thinest suggestion of moonlight through the papered panes. She blinked as he slid it open, admitting moonlight fully into the dim interior - somewhere along the line, the oil in the lamp had run out, extinguishing the interior light while both could not notice.
A time later, she gathered up her clothes, pulled them to herself like a washer woman, and did her best to compose herself before leaving. She pushed her hair off her shoulders, fair certain that someone - everyone - would know what she had done by some minute physical detail. She schooled her breath into a slow, gentle lapping like ripples reaching the shore of a pond from somewhere far in the center. Peace found her heart with the familiarity of the exercise. She stepped into the night and slid the door shut behind her.
Katsushiro left that night. She noticed him as she left the hut, trying to look composed. She wasn't sure why she glanced up at the little graveyard that protected the village, but she saw an extra silhouette there and ran to catch him before he left. Kanbei and Shikiroji showed up just behind, one sanguine and composed, the other curious. He did not offer Kirara any knowing glances, nor did he look shocked - Kanbei hadn't told him, and he had not guessed. To herself, Kirara suspected it was the only secret Kanbei had from his spouse.
Painfully, she wondered why. Maybe- supplied a deep, quiet part of her mind as she smiled at Katsushiro announcing his journey - maybe he can't bear to admit one more defeat. Her thoughts slid away like so much water retreating over sand when Katsushiro took her hands, pushed his blue gaze up against hers.
"Kirara-dono," He began. He meant to say something, then just shook his head. "Please take care of yourself."
He explained why he had to go, and she understood. It was time for him to go and get his own story to tell. Kanbei, for his part, told the boy to fly. There was the heart of a real samurai in Katsushiro now, he just had to get used to how that felt, and to teach him, Kanbei gave him a new sword to learn the ways of - his own.
A week later, Shikiroji and Kanbei followed. Kirara looked over during the planting, and he was there, watching. She looked again and there was no one. She took a breath, and let him go - the Samurai would come back when they were hungry. Inside, she felt empty, but she smiled anyway. She had known it was coming, deep inside. And there were four samurai that would always be at the village, now. The three that left entrusted the defense to those that remained, an unspoken trust that Kirara knew would not be broken. This thought reassured her, and her memories kept her company through the planting.
And someday, they would come back.
I apologize that it's a horrible mishsmash of pairings, some of which I am probably alone in enjoying.
Anyway.
Fandom: Samurai 7
Pairings: Katsushiro/Kirarara, Kirara/Kanbei, Kanbei/Kyuuzo, hints of Kanbei/Shikiroji
Rating: NC/17 for M/F
Words: 2735
Kirara wasn't there when Katsushiro finally managed to surprise his sensei in spar. She had to rely on a secondhand telling from Shikiroji, who seemed more than slightly amused by the whole thing. Kanbei had entered the spar with his usual detachment - parry and block, criticize and praise in the same non-tone he used for anything he was uninterested in.
Katsushiro, growing sly with the same sort of foxish instincts that Kanbei had, waited until the last minute to throw in the new move he'd been practicing. His sensei barely parried it, too used to the gap in skills between them. Both swords took a nasty nick, impacting with more force than either expected, warriors sliding quickly apart in a rush of quick exhales at the near miss.
"Katsu-noji was grinning when he started the move," Shikiroji said, his Yari braced over his shoulder and a smile of his own turning his features merry. "But it disappeared awfully quickly when he realized he'd actually surprised Kanbei-san." Shikiroji laughed.
"They both walked away very quickly. I think you'll hear a lot of sharpening tonight."
Katsushiro wore a dazed but smiling expression for the rest of the day, lost in thought even when Kirara approached to bring him his lunch. He smiled more brightly for her, and ate in silence.
His sensei disappeared for the rest of the afternoon, leaving Shikiroji standing guard alone over the rice fields. Shikiroji did not complain, but he did seem grateful for Kirara's company during dinner.
"When we were younger," He reminisced, "Kanbei-san was almost as doe-eyed as Katsu-noji." He confided the knowledge as if it were a secret, revealing Kanbei's unspoken past as if in revenge for being left to stand alone in the cooling evening. "Sometimes I wish we could go back to our youth."
The sound of sword scraping on stone interrupted their conversation. Shikiroji winked at Kirara, and let her go. She tried her best not to let her feet rush, to push the door open casually. There he sat, working the sword back and forth over the whetstone with slow, patient deliberation. He didn't look up when she came in, and didn't protest when she settled down beside him to watch him work. The quiet, his steady presence, and the slow rasp of metal on stone were like a soothing song for Kirara - a lullaby that she had learned to take comfort from when what she really wanted could not be had. She let her mind wander. It brought her back to the one question she was always dying to ask.
"How did you know?"
"I observe." Kanbei replied, softly.
"When the battle finished, you sat by my side." He said, his eyes traveling the blade of his sword as if it were a traitor to him. He worked at the nicks on the blade, pressing it firm against the whetstone, his shoulders taut with the smooth motion. "When the snow started falling, you were still there." The blade scraped softly, a sound that soothed her more and more.
"When I hear you sharpen it, it reminds me that you're there." She said, watching. Smiling.
He looked up, eyes weary, but the motion did not stop. The nick was persistent, but he more so.
"No bandits will come this year." He said at last, straightened. The nick was almost gone.
"You'll go too." She said. Kirara could feel the corners of her eyes turning moist, squinted against the tears and turned the corners of her mouth up in what felt a desperate snarl. She smiled. "Promise you'll come back when you get hungry, Kanbei-san."
He looked at her again, really seeing. His eyes caught the faint light from the lantern, reflected tiny pinpricks of brilliance back at her, as he studied her. Sized her up. Kirara felt brave in that moment.
"Please, can't we just...?" Kirara didn't know what she wanted.
"I'm too old for you." He said, not unkindly. She seized his hands, and he did not stop her. Age had little to do with the statement - Kanbei was nearing fifty, but aging well. Kirara was not even twenty yet, though he had never asked her age. "I'm ready to die, and you are just beginning to want so badly to live. It would bring only sorrow for you."
"Someone should be sad for you - really sad for you, Kanbei." Everyone saw his value, but no one saw who he was. It was hard to say these things. She'd been told to do her best, and he had denied her even before she could say it.
It was impossible for her to give voice to her true emotion. She found her hands bunched together around tight clumps of thick cotton. Her skirt tangled and twisted around sweating fingers as she tried to wrench the words out, simply to have them said. As if that would release the tension, causing everything to unravel like so many strands of homespun. "I-"
The samurai killed her words with a look. They died, unrevealed assassins of voice perceived and calculated before they could spring forth in ambush. She realized only after her words failed that his hands were easing hers gently free of their fabric vices.
"I am out of love." Kanbei explained, the flowers on the backs of his hands wilting with the softening of his grip on Kirara's hands. "A samurai must love his comrades, love those who have given their lives so that he may live," His hesitancy said that most of his love had gone to that. "He loves an enemy who is noble and capable."
"Kyuuzo." She said. How very close she had been - he'd had love in him still when they'd met, if only she'd been more sure of herself. She reached out anyway, touching the scar on his neck. It still felt warm and new, the reknit flesh soft and vulnerable. In time, it would stretch and grow hard like a proper scar.
After a while he said, "I can't let him wait because I am tied." His voice was low and soft, she could feel it under his skin when he spoke, the soft shift and pull of muscle in his jaw. Her hand slid down his neck, tracing the line of scar, cord of muscle. It outlined the jut of bone under loose clothes and armor selected carefully to stay out of his way. It defended poorly, but he would make up for it with skill he kept from being unburdened. It slid easily aside.
His chest was a wreck of scars. Kirara pulled back, her fingers hesitant over the corded flesh. "What happened?" She whispered, this wound unfamiliar to her.
"A castle fell on Shikiroji." Kanbei said. "Only, it hit me first."
Shikiroji had lost his hand - this wound on the samurai's chest was large enough for his heart to have been torn right out. But it was probably only the last in a long string of wounds that had destroyed him. He'd believed Shikiroji dead for a long time, he'd said once. He was the one who had died. She pressed both her hands to it, assured herself of the steady pulse beneath, warm and slow and vital.
He put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her away very gently. When he looked into her eyes, his were deep - emotional, almost. The pupils were wide, glassy. His breath was serene, but faster. "If you dive into tainted water, you will carry that taint with you." He said, voice rough. She was affecting him, and she'd never seen him be affected. Like everything about him, it was beautiful. "You'll pollute the water you touch in the future."
She leaned up, closed the hungry distance between their mouths. Filled it up with kissing, her tongue assertive on his lips until he gave in. It tasted clean, she thought, not polluted at all. Her hands sank into his hair, soft like ripples in a stream. When the kiss ended, she said, "I'm so thirsty, it doesn't matter."
She leaned, and pulled with her hand holds, and he gave easily. He braced against the wall, pulled her into his lap. Pursuing, she settled over his thighs - he seemed almost smaller when she was so close to him, her seated in elevation. It was strange for her to sit higher than him. She turned her mouth in, caught the scar that her fingers had been playing over. She put her mouth on it and sucked hard - felt Kanbei tense up and a soft noise ground from his throat. Somewhere inside she felt triumphant for getting him to react at all.
His hands bunched her skirt up at her hips, pushing the soft red and blue fabric up over her thighs with surprising care. His fingers sought out the junction of her thighs while she worked hard at his neck, careful of her teeth. She focused her attention on the scar that Kyuuzo had given him, so that if a mark was left it would be less noticeable. When his fingers touched her center, she gasped. Her mouth broke contact with his skin wetly, with a soft noise. His touch, deft, was soft as the petals tattooed on the backs of his hands. Coaxing, he stroked his index finger back and forth along the center of her folds, bringing a soft, velvet pleasure to her. There was no roughness to his hands - either the gloves or his own skill saved him from the callouses that marked so many Samurai apart as uncivilized.
Sensation folded her nerves into a tight bundle of attention, his fingers growing wet with contact, turning their motions into a silky, delicious slide. Whatever Kanbei could be accused of, inexperience and incomposure were not part of it. Her body tried to curl into the touch, her hands sliding down his arms from his shoulders to his elbows, gripping, encouraging. She found her face in his hair, her chin resting on the junction of his neck. His hair was cool from the air, and smelled clean and aqual to her. When his fingers were slick enough for his liking, he shifted his hand.
Kirara's attention centered on the slow, pulling burn of his attentions, her own voice surprising to her ears. Kanbei made a soft noise against her neck, and she hushed herself. Sensation pulled her attention inward, her inhales easy but her breath struggling to go back out again as if drawn center wards toward his touch. Her fingers snaked between them unbidden, pushing labia aside to keep his touch centered. Focus narrowed into a hushed, burning bud of pleasure, muscles tensing. Her body curled inward, hips arching faintly in rhythm to his caress. On the verge of pain, it bloomed.
Pleasure spread through her body, her spine pushing erect and then backwards, her fingers loosening their grip on his arm at last as orgasm blossomed through her nerves. It faded slowly, and she sagged in his lap, her mouth pushed tight against the junction of Kanbei's shoulder and neck. Her jaw ached, and she unlocked her teeth from the layers of fabric between them and his flesh. Her hands slid up, pushed at the robes covering his chest before he caught them.
He pulled her close, ran his hand through her hair once, upsetting her already unseated headpiece. "Sleep," He told her, his voice rough at the edges.
Kirara's body told her that it was a fine idea, drowse overtaking her senses. It was her mind that rebelled at last, assuring her that this was not all that she wanted. Bracing her hands on his chest, she pushed herself up, shaking her head. Before he could protest, she started to push aside the layers of fabric he covered himself with, hands discarding armor and at least two layers of linen before they contacted ready flesh. His hands came down to seize hers, but she refused to be dissuaded. Her fingers moved under his, coaxing, until his hands fell away to his sides, and he let his head loll back in surrender.
Accepting his defeat, she pushed herself forward, put one hand on his shoulder to steady herself. The other stayed between them, guiding, as she pushed himself onto his length. With her in control, she felt very little pain as she broke her barrier on him. There was a sharp, deep tearing, and then it was done. She caught her breath, found his gentle hands on her hips when the stars left her vision.
Motion came naturally, she pushed and rocked, he did too. Neither made a sound, she grit her teeth around the pain until it faded, then her jaw went slack. The feeling that overtook her this time was more quiet, it crept rather than crashed, overtaking her senses softly, taking her conscious mind away. She floated as she felt his pace intensify, then hot semen sliding down her thighs. She didn't see his face as he came, but after, as he pulled her close enough for her to hear his racing heartbeat underneath the scar that should have let it free, his expression was composed.
After, Kanbei slipped out of her grasp while she lay soaking in her thoughts and the wet patches in her robes. He claimed his sword from it's place by the whet-stone and stepped past her through the door that admitted only the thinest suggestion of moonlight through the papered panes. She blinked as he slid it open, admitting moonlight fully into the dim interior - somewhere along the line, the oil in the lamp had run out, extinguishing the interior light while both could not notice.
A time later, she gathered up her clothes, pulled them to herself like a washer woman, and did her best to compose herself before leaving. She pushed her hair off her shoulders, fair certain that someone - everyone - would know what she had done by some minute physical detail. She schooled her breath into a slow, gentle lapping like ripples reaching the shore of a pond from somewhere far in the center. Peace found her heart with the familiarity of the exercise. She stepped into the night and slid the door shut behind her.
Katsushiro left that night. She noticed him as she left the hut, trying to look composed. She wasn't sure why she glanced up at the little graveyard that protected the village, but she saw an extra silhouette there and ran to catch him before he left. Kanbei and Shikiroji showed up just behind, one sanguine and composed, the other curious. He did not offer Kirara any knowing glances, nor did he look shocked - Kanbei hadn't told him, and he had not guessed. To herself, Kirara suspected it was the only secret Kanbei had from his spouse.
Painfully, she wondered why. Maybe- supplied a deep, quiet part of her mind as she smiled at Katsushiro announcing his journey - maybe he can't bear to admit one more defeat. Her thoughts slid away like so much water retreating over sand when Katsushiro took her hands, pushed his blue gaze up against hers.
"Kirara-dono," He began. He meant to say something, then just shook his head. "Please take care of yourself."
He explained why he had to go, and she understood. It was time for him to go and get his own story to tell. Kanbei, for his part, told the boy to fly. There was the heart of a real samurai in Katsushiro now, he just had to get used to how that felt, and to teach him, Kanbei gave him a new sword to learn the ways of - his own.
A week later, Shikiroji and Kanbei followed. Kirara looked over during the planting, and he was there, watching. She looked again and there was no one. She took a breath, and let him go - the Samurai would come back when they were hungry. Inside, she felt empty, but she smiled anyway. She had known it was coming, deep inside. And there were four samurai that would always be at the village, now. The three that left entrusted the defense to those that remained, an unspoken trust that Kirara knew would not be broken. This thought reassured her, and her memories kept her company through the planting.
And someday, they would come back.
