Work Text:
Hey,
can you all
use my death?
Hey,
can you all
crack me open when I die
and pull out the pieces of me
after they’ve gone cold?
Hey,
Shugen,
break open my ribcage
and use my death
to understand life.
Hey…
---
I.
Cold feels good on fresh bruises. Unbroken skin that blossoms a pulsing purple can be kept calm under something cold, you learn it young.
You have to, as a member of the Yamada clan.
A name synonymous with death carries weight, even among children, and growing up with it means violence should they think you get too close. They hold you down and pound fist after fist into your skin until it burns. Stone after stone. Stick after stick. It’s only when words come out that the cold does nothing, and even you must strike back. You’re small, and slight, and some of them think you don’t have the strength to pass a sword through a neck with enough grace and skill that it passes without pain.
But you don’t necessarily need an excess of strength for that.
(You find early that you don’t like the look of someone crying in pain. Stone after stone, stick after stick -
there’s different methods of making someone leave you alone.
You devour words like air, after all.)
“Cold feels good on fresh bruises, doesn’t it, Sagi? It seems to keep them from blooming.”
(Even girls aren’t spared the whispers, the looks, the defensive walls and stone slingers of other children. You wrap Sagiri’s wrist with cool cloth to hide the purple starting to gather under the skin.) “But soaking in a hot bath later will feel like completing a loop, Sagi.” (When you smile at her she finally laughs.
Few others seem to like it when you smile.)
II.
You find early that you don’t like the look of someone crying in pain, and even the littlest twitch of a lip in a beheaded body makes you feel sick. Some of the older samurais laugh at the look on your face and slap you on the back so hard you nearly topple onto the fresh corpse. “Can’t handle it yet? Gonna have to get used to it, that’s death, kid.”
You sneer at that.
“No, it shouldn’t have to be like that.”
But they don’t get it. (They don’t get it.)
You spare the criminals all apologies, and try to swallow it down.
When sickness spreads, from time to time, among families, you see the same thing. Hacking, coughing, sobbing, spitting up blood, people drowning in open air because they just can’t take a proper breath anymore and it freezes itself on their faces - the last visage anyone will ever remember of them. Every fluid: piss and shit and vomit and tears and sweat and blood all over the floor, sometimes they grow skeletal so that you can see the bumps that line down their neck clearly. Just one strike, a painless death, a peaceful expression to soothe the living that continue with that memory.
No, not always.
Get used to it, they say.
“No.”
III.
You find early that you don’t like the look of someone crying in pain. But the look of the source of tears is a different matter entirely.
It starts with your own wounds, bruises blooming like purple flowers and blood oozing like sap. You devour words like air, and any time spent outside of Shion’s dojo is spent swallowing them up, learning the names of this and that, digging your fingers into the earth and mashing what you find into a paste that you smear across your skin. Sometimes, it burns so badly that even cold won’t calm it. But sometimes -
(The first time you snuck back to the execution grounds you stole one of the heads from the basket and marvelled at its weight. You’re small, and you’re slight, and no one even noticed as you hurried away with the foul thing wrapped up and clutched to your chest. The skin was cold when you unwrapped it, and the face frozen in a state that makes you think they could have been sleeping through their execution. Blood starts to turn dark and hard, and day after day you peel a little skin back, pluck out an eye, touch the soft bone that you get tearing through muscle and fat.
Until the day when the smell grows so foul that it draws Shion around, and the crack of the jaw breaking has him running in.
There are tears in your eyes from the smell, and from the carelessness with which you handled the bone that it broke, and because now it’ll be taken away from you and you don’t know if you’ll ever get another chance like this.
He touches your head and smiles. “I didn’t see anything.” And when you don’t laugh: “get it?”
“ Sensei…”
You wonder if his eyes can’t water anymore, because he doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by the smell. Or, maybe, that’s just what it’s like, when you get to his level.
He takes you out of town to burn the remains, and with your heads bowed you wish the soul peace.
“And, thank you for teaching me,” you add aloud.)
Cold skin is best for fresh curiosity, but a cremation will lighten your soul and feel like the completion of a loop.
IV.
You devour words like air, and soon one language isn’t enough for everything you want to see or say.
Like a little Genpaku, you’re told.
(But of course? Why should one kingdom stand alone? Even with approval to research, you struggle to gain the approval to import. By being so secluded, by shutting themselves off to other parts of the world, kingdoms and countries all around the world were limiting themselves to one narrow view. How could anyone think that those who treated their pains and ailments were really trying their hardest when they hardly bothered to look at things beyond their own nose? How could you even begin to believe you’ve figured it all out until you have all of the facts? It’s only natural.
As things fall together more easily, so does the sword. And, no longer do you see horror in the faces of those you condemn.)
Shion sets you up with your fellow students one day, and stands back silently, the upper part of his robe removed to display his bare back. “I’ll be the instrument today, instead of the sword. Fuchi?”
You wonder how the cold ink feels across his skin, and your words (even colder, some say) describe each and every detail that could be seen if you just peeled open the skin on the back of his neck. How does he feel? “A sharp blade and proper technique isn’t always enough if we can’t visualize where we need to go.”
With Shion’s approval you grow more bold. The Yamada style of execution is easily taught, but the how’s and why’s are something else entirely. It takes kneeling over bodies and tracing vertebrae over their back, peeling it open until you see. This is where metal slips through like a knife into warmed wax. And this, and this, and this, and if you read this here, this image here shows, this research here ah but, but -
Cold skin and rigid muscle feels right, but so does a flexible body, pulled from the grounds, just barely dead. Blood still trying to flow. The way the warmth seeps away as you go, slowly, to where the rest of your wares stay.
You pull bodies apart in a section made just for you. Where various books lay open, some stained with dark dried blood or the other fluids that come when the bonesaw cuts through. Different languages, different handwriting, different models and ways of describing what they saw in the very same human form. Your own handwriting is the most stained of all, so much that sometimes you can hardly read it and have to rush in a panic to rewrite it until your fingers cramp and your muscles ache and you tell yourself, you force yourself, to rest because you may be called to an execution tomorrow. And, criminal or not, you won’t be allowing them to die with bulging eyes and a face of fear.
Despite all the sadistic things some assume of you, that’s not what you do this for.
V.
You’re small, and slight, but no one bothers to ask if you need help. Even now, they look at you like your name is death and you are everything they fear. They whisper, they glare, sometimes they shout
sometimes they sling stones
but the acquisition of a new subject - a cold body - soothes whatever ache is to come from it.
“Sen?”
(Or, no, that’s not fair to say. Senta, whose aching muscles and blisters you’ve treated, Senta, who smiles back when you smile at him, tries. He’s small too, and fat, and even together neither of you have the muscle to carry a body without needing many breaks, but still he tries.
He’s better suited for art. Your own scrawl is hardly detailed enough, and though he almost faints the first few times you crack ribs, he tries.
And it’s beautiful.)
“Sen? This isn’t… the actuation of blood flow.”
(It’s not. It’s nowhere near that. Instead it's you, you, and you think at first you’re carrying one of your cadavers. But no, no, the fluid lines of the ink paint it more as a dance than anything.
Senta snatches it away before your thoughts can go any further. Red faced, stammering, slamming the real product you’d asked for in front of you while making excuses, exceptions, and then trying to brush the painting from your mind with a change in subject. It makes you smile, and that makes him stop.)
“Hey, Fuchi.”
“Hm?”
“Nothing, nevermind.”
Senta. And then: Shugen, and Sagiri, and Tensa, and sometimes even Kishou. And Genji, who’d thought you too soft before, who was among the ones who narrowed their eyes when your face twisted at a painful execution, eventually saw as well. It was best when he and his little sister helped, both of them practically strong enough to carry a fully grown, headless adult corpse on their own.
“Hey, Fuchi, when you smile, sometimes you look pretty scary,” Senta says that day.
You frown.
“I think that’s what most people see of you. When you’re… sharp, and scary, or serious,” he plays with the ties of the basket where he carries his supplies. “When you’re here, though, there’s something -”
(It was everything to you when the others came - despite the looks on their faces, their wrinkled noses, and even the comments that came out. It was everything to you.
This is what I do it for.)
VI.
Cold skin feels strange on fresh bruises
even when the clan decides to allow your research, others don’t let go so quickly. An older Yamada isn’t as easy for peers to bully, but there are samurai in the magistrate’s office with their minds stuck in the past. Those who kick you down and strike and strike and strike. Cold skin feels strange on fresh bruises, and you feel it when you cling to the bodies, eyes closed until it all stops and you can stand without feeling dizzy.
Superstitious bastards. No better than children who fear the concept of death and sling stones.
“ - but I would hardly call them samurai if they can’t handle knowing a little more about the lives we’re told to take.”
Outside of class, outside of their duties, this is how you become properly acquainted with Shugen. One on one. When he walks in on you, face bruised and dirty, blood upon your cheek, glowering into the open cavity of the woman whose intestines you’d cut so delicately, to find and uncover the piece inside that you saw so rarely on the execution grounds.
“Your technique… marvelous.”
(It freezes you when he comes close then, tying back his sleeves. It surprises you when he smiles so easily, after all you’ve heard of him. After all you’ve seen.
You recall Senta, hands playing with the basket where his piece of you sat. “When you’re here, when you look over these bodies, you seem so much more gentle than before.” You smile at Shugen, genuine and soft as you gently cut to highlight the womb. “We rarely get bodies like these, look at that, it’s so incredible to think that all human life starts in this one, small organ.”
One thing is clear.
Shugen struggles to be gentle. Where Senta would see your dissections as a waltz through a corpse’s organs and tissues, you imagine his image of Shugen would be more akin to a butcher with his brutality. “Hey. Is that how you’d like your own body to be treated after death?” and that’s where the Shugen you knew from periphery came into view.
“I’m not a criminal. Those who break the laws shouldn’t be subject to any mercy, before or after their deaths.”
(Ah, yes.
There it was.
That Shugen.
Sometimes, when you smile, it’s scary. Sometimes the look in Shugen’s eyes were full of nothing but hate for a vision of the past that hovered permanently over his eyes.)
“Then consider instead what you’re doing to the people of the future by your brutality. Move your hand, let me show you -” and from the ribcage he’d been so wickedly smashing in and ripping apart, you uncover a cold, still heart at the center. “You cut into the film around it, and even sliced into some of the vessels so that they’re unrecognizable. Do you know what researchers have learned from inspecting those two simple things? Were you an assistant to them back then, I would wager it would take much longer to understand the nature of the human heart, which would mean more innocents die of heart-related disease and illness.”
“Well what… what would you learn?”
“I would say learning about death is important in order to learn about life.”
(Sometimes, when you smile, it’s scary. Sometimes, you’re scary. But sometimes, someone will look at you with something gentle -
Shugen smiles so gently when he looks at you. So kindly. So intrigued, like when you were first starting out, devouring words and languages faster than an execution. You never believed you’d have a chance to play the teacher, not in the Yamada clan, where the speed and sharpness of your blade was the most important inheritance to give. When you smile, Fuchi, sometimes it’s scary. But sometimes…)
Cold paper, cool bones, feels good on burning skin. Shugen will rest his head in your lap, some of your scrolls held above his head while your fingers wander over the parts of a skull, comparing. Contrasting.
You cannot change his mind to the brutality in which he believes a criminal’s body before death should experience, his executions make you feel ill in ways you forgot you could be, looking at blood and pain. Finding yourself unable to stop it, ease it, cease it - the shogunate seem to enjoy Shugen’s form of justice too much. But you guide his hands when he steps into your world, and he works with great care underneath it, as he does in all his studies with all the others. The blades there are sharp, as a proper sword should be, and he listens, and he learns. Shugen sees you so well, sees everything you could possibly want from a living, breathing body, and he gives it to you graciously, full of love. And and despite the illness his justice causes within you, you can’t help but smile gentler and gentler whenever he comes around.
Cold paper, cool bones, feels good on burning skin.
“I saw you, Fuchi,” Shugen’s voice is so quiet and gentle, and like learned behaviour your body responds as it always does when he’s so close. “Why did you do it?”
“You have to be more specific, Shuu,” your throat is dry, and you try to think instead about the mechanics behind your burning skin, the blood underneath, what makes your stomach move like a thousand paper cranes. “I do a lot of things.” Your focus dissipates into thin air when he touches your hand, and your eyes snap up to him.
“The men from the magistrate’s office, the one that beat you before -”
“Ah. That.” A man who’s pregnant wife had come down sick.
“You said before, they shouldn’t expect you to give them any medicine after that. But you did.”
And why was that so confusing? “People are relatively small minded when it comes down to it, and I do a lot of things that most people don’t approve of. But that doesn’t mean I’ll selfishly hold back if I can help them.” You pull your hand away from his and wave it, creating distance, brushing him off. “Funny, though, how the cadaver I’d gotten back then, that offended him so much, was the very thing that helped me figure out what was going on with his wife.” Sometimes, when you smile, it’s scary. You mimic the feeling, the way your muscles feel, when you smile that way.
But you’ve never been very good at pretending to be someone you’re not.
When Shugen smiles, it’s never scary. He reserves that aura for frowns and narrowed eyes and a face filled with muscles pulled so tight you could almost see the pulse of blood.
But when he smiles at you and takes your hand again, you can almost forget that part of him.
Until he slays the Silver Serpent clan, and those paper cranes are replaced with blades you imagine as ragged as his.
VII.
It’s been so long since you’ve felt hot tears on your face, since you’ve felt grief overtaking every other sensation.
I would say learning about death is important in order to learn about life.
How little you knew when you held that over Shugen, so proud of the way he was so eager to learn from you. How little you knew. Senta’s glasses are cold, his sword is cold, his body is cold and deformed like Gantetsusai’s left hand, left behind in their travel. Genji is cold - a scorched and burnt form long after the fire. Most likely, Eizen is cold as well, broken by a giant who lost his head hours later. Cold as well. Sagiri tells you this. Tensa is cold, left behind apparently spilling his life out onto the island soil, which seemed to soak it up, feed on it. Kishou is cold, his body broken on a ship, or already swelling and submerged under the sea that brought them here. Shion and Tensa’s criminal, the little mountain child named Nurugai, tell you this.
What do you know about life now, except how precious each of those people were to you. How precious they remained. How hot you felt while your tears fell, and how cold the bodies were only served to make things worse.
How eager were you to look at others before as parts and pieces, envision what lay underneath. Muscle, bone, sinew, viscera. Sometimes, when you smile, it’s scary. Sometimes, you’re scary. Senta’s vision of you so long ago - of you so delicately dancing with the dead - was so soft and gentle and beautiful and wrong.
VIII.
(Tao, spirit, essence, soul.
What was that, and why couldn’t you cut it out of any corpse? Why couldn’t you find it, see it, hold it? Shion couldn’t say. I would say learning about death is important in order to learn about life. But what happens if death is all you focus on?)
(You don’t want to kill Lord Tensen. Mei’s sentimentality only makes that desire stronger.
From the bottom of my heart, I wish for a safe return for all of us. Not just the executioners, not just the criminals -
Tao Fa smiles to keep herself sane.
And as hot blood soaks into your clothes, as you feel and form your body around this cold, metal Tao of yours, as you force yourself to focus on on what was under Tao Fa’s skin, on what she was sending out, on the future, on life, on learning, on breathing, on living, on teaching, on coming back alive, you think you’re doing the same.
You’ve been doing it since you held Senta’s glasses in your hands.
You’re cold metal held up by Toma’s earth.
You’re cold metal, wrapping yourself around the wooden Tao Fa’s melting form. “It is over now.” She’s cold, the water around you is cold. Cold that feels good on warm blood and blossoming bruises, and you want badly to return the favor. A chance for her to close her eyes. “Enough,” you beg. You hold her until Gantetsusai strikes Ju Fa down
until you feel something slip away.
Tao, spirit, essence, soul.
Life.)
I would say learning about death is important in order to learn about life.
Can life teach us more about death, then?
IX.
Cold steel splits warm skin, and it’s what he imagines a dissection must feel like to the other end. A gentleness that doesn’t fit an execution - doesn’t fit Shugen - because though it hurts, it doesn’t kill.
Those newfound principles don’t exist in the real world. But doesn’t your younger self know, doesn’t he realize, doesn’t he remember? Every bruise and beating and dirty look, the way this real world feared outsiders to the point of banishment, of refusing books and the medical advancement that fueled you. Can’t he feel Toma’s hand just as well as Shugen’s, reaching out to smile at him and call him sincere. Couldn’t he feel Tao Fa’s liquidation beneath him just like that first head stolen in the night?
Can’t he hear? The sound of grief in Shuu’s voice,
the sound of your name in Gantetsusai’s?
X.
I would say, learning about life is an important way to learn about death, just as death is to life. The way people fight, and laugh, and cry, and survive. The way you and Tao Fa, just like everyone else, envisioned a future for yourself to keep you going. You’ve devoured words like air, and now you can’t get them out no matter how hard you try. Warnings and warmth and lessons.
---
Hey,
break open my ribcage
and pull out my heart
and use my death
to understand…
No.
Do you understand
what those who fought and died here
were fighting for?
Hey,
Shugen,
can you
continue to live
will you let them stay alive too?
Hey,
You feel yourself growing cold in Gantetsusai’s warm arms. And hope something about that will find a way to soothe the hurts you couldn’t heal.