Chapter Text
Her breasts grew to be even more tender as time passed on, and Mizu understood this was not something to be healed from.
Do not let it show, Mizu, she reminded herself with a grinding of teeth.
She ruined her kimono by the river when doing the washing one day; an unfortunate accident, she explained with plain chagrin to Swordfather. He grunted as she expected, directing her to cut up the cloth into rags to use as a fire starter. Mizu did so: tossing scraps into the pile, but taking care to cut the rest in a spiral to save long pieces of material to wind tightly above her ribcage. She explored her bound, stiff chest with her fingertips that night; she had to take shorter breaths with every inhale, but at least her nipples escaped detection.
Mizu felt a touch winded the next day as she raised her hammer in practice. Perhaps her mind and mouth were lacking in air, when she confidently asked Swordfather when the next samurai was arriving.
“What do you mean?”
“Now that the imposter is gone,” she explained almost impatiently, “who are we observing next?”
“No one.”
Mizu's mouth dropped. “But—the steel—how will you know how to form—?”
Swordfather made a gruff sound. “I know enough.”
“But—”
“And you do not. Practice, before you observe any more.”
Mizu could feel her own skin ripple over like hammered steel, hard and gray. She frowned, her brow pinched in place, though she didn't push it. She had found that if she prodded Swordfather in one direction, he was twice as likely to go the opposite way.
She hunched her shoulders to attempt to concentrate on the steel before her, the insides of her arms chafing against her stiff bindings. Every time she thought she could forget the cloth that bound her chest, hid her form—pain would pulse through her ribs, aggravating her angry heart. A hot rush engulfed her spine as she straightened up again. “What's the point in learning how to make a sword if I don't know how to use it?”
“What is the point in you knowing how to use a sword if you're too blind to use it?” Swordfather's words bit her right back.
The heat crawled up her neck to reach her cheeks. “I bet I can feel my blade sink into an enemy's stomach just as much as anyone else. Maybe even better. What if I can be better?”
Clink, clink.
“This is how you become better, Mizu.”
She hacked and split logs, chips and splinters. Threw them in the red, red fire, a roar. Sparks replacing splinters. Blades replacing raw steel.
“You must destroy in order to create,” Mizu observed to Swordfather one evening in the muffled dead of winter.
He grunted, and was silent for a moment. She wondered if she could possibly be wrong.
“What is destroyed, can be made new,” Swordfather finally said, and Mizu wondered if he spoke of humans as well.
She eventually got used to breathing without expanding her chest; the same way she got used to seeing without her eyes.
Practice, she reminded herself, whenever a tree trunk stopped her blade short. She would wipe her brow and try again.
She grew halfway decent at cooking, and shot up like bamboo, as Swordfather would say—and she did notice how much closer to her heart-level his violet voice sounded every day.
Mizu waited for the day that he would observe that her voice was not deepening to black. Still ink diluted with water.
That day did not come.
Her chest remained compressed even as it grew heavy, but she did allow her shoulders to ease; just a little, and just around Swordfather.
She became so much better that she nearly forgot why she wanted to improve in the first place.
Though she supposed that particular fire couldn't be smothered even with the tightest of bindings.
“Mizu.”
She raised her head from her porridge, turning toward the door. “Swordfather?”
“Someone is approaching.”
Mizu frowned. Normally she could hear footfalls before Swordfather could even see the man attached to said feet.
“Who is it?”
“A man with a broken blade.”
Mizu wondered if Swordfather had somehow forgotten the face of the laughing man. She swore she could remember it, without ever having seen it. “Has he come to demand a whole blade from me?” Her frown ran deeper. She was so much better now. He doesn't deserve better from me.
A grunt. “No. Not him.”
“Who—”
The question died on her tongue as she tasted a shade of red that had not haunted her in years.