Archive of Our Own

He cannot decide if Mugen is asleep or awake; his breathing reveals nothing except that he has taken a bullet perilously close to the lungs. Even when he stirs and mumbles 's Fuu, his words are slurred like sleeptalk, like they're coming up from the bottom of a well.

"At her father's grave," Jin answers, half-convinced that he's talking to himself even more than he usually does when he's talking to Mugen. And if he's talking to himself, then he's also lying to himself, or at least dissembling, because she's not at her father's grave so much as she's digging it. He can imagine it so clearly there is scarcely room for the vision behind his eyelids: Fuu wielding a shovel, hip-deep in the stony island, a smudge of dirt just above her resolute mouth.

Mugen—awake after all—clears his throat noisily. "Pathetic old fucker."

Jin can think of nothing much to say. He can only think about how his blanket is clinging to his skin, how there should not be space for this much heat in a single room. "You never met him."

"Neither did you," Mugen points out. And then: "Do you think there's any rice left in the cooking pot?"

There is rice left in the cooking pot, congealed glutinously to the sides, starting to go sour but still edible. Jin refuses to feel guilty as they scrape it into a pair of battered bowls. It's not as if Fuu's father has any use for it.

Mugen eats as he always does, messily and noisily, but with a new stiffness complicating the motion of chopsticks to mouth. It is a stiffness, Jin thinks, that will limber out of him only over months and years, no matter how hard he pushes against it; he is young, but not young enough that he will heal easily or completely.

In between imprecise mouthfuls, Mugen says, "We need to get out of here."

Privately, Jin agrees with him. "We have at least a week before this gets back to Edo. More."

"You do whatever you want. Me, I'm going while the going's good."

Ordering Mugen to stop being stupid has long since proved an ineffective tactic—and besides, even Mugen is not stupid enough to believe he's going back on the road in hiss current condition. Jin concentrates on his rice.

"Hey, I thought we were having a fucking conversation here—" Most likely, Mugen is only talking because he's already emptied his bowl. A sideways glance confirms this. "You got more rice than me! Shit!"

"You know I didn't." Jin sets his bowl on the uneven floor. He's mostly unlearnt a lifetime's worth of table manners in the past few months, so surely it is not decorum slowing his pace. He forces himself to consider other possibilities: the dead ache along his collarbone, the insistent throbbing between his ribs.

"You gonna finish that or what?"

Jin nudges the bowl in Mugen's direction.

"What, I was just asking. I don't want your fucking food. It's got your spit all over it."

Letting himself collapse back onto the futon reminds him of his early days in the dojo, when he was first learning to take a fall, and how he had as much genius for that as for everything else—more, perhaps, because it was really just a question of cooperating with gravity. The bedding sighs as he descends. Cautiously, cautiously, Jin curls up on his side.

He listens to Mugen grumble himself quiet; listens to the wet clatter of chopsticks and bowl; and later, in some syrupy unstirring part of the night, he half-wakes to hear the door creak open. He is familiar enough with the rhythm of Fuu's footsteps that he can pay them no mind, and listen instead for the sound of her crying.

Jin wakes up feeling like all the hollow places in him are cobwebbed with mucus, and he needs to blink twice before he registers the slant of the sunlight across the floor. It is almost noon.

Mugen's bedding sprawls rumpled and abandoned. The third futon, neatly folded in the corner, looks much like it did the night before. Jin levers himself into a sitting position and slips his katana into his belt before he begins the process of standing.

He cannot believe that Mugen has made good on his threat and departed, and it signifies little that he can see none of the man's scant possessions in the room. Aside from the sword strapped to his back, Mugen seldom owns more than he can stuff in his pockets, with plenty of room for what he does not own left over besides.

When he pushes the door open and steps outside, there's Mugen, five feet to the left of him, trousers unlaced and slipping down his skinny hips as he pees against the wall. Beyond his hunched shoulders, the sea runs seamlessly into the sky. Gulls wheel and clamor.

"Where's Fuu?" Jin asks, and Mugen's stream sputters to a halt, but his head doesn't turn.

"Dunno. She left a couple of hours ago. Said she was going to town."

"Why?"

"Fuck if I know," Mugen says, punctuated by another burst of piss.

Jin turns to go, but somehow his turning brings him to an angle where he can see Mugen's face with perfect clarity.

Mugen sneers. "What, you think you're going to go protect her? Like that? You want to get another sword stuck in you or something?" He gives his penis an unabashedly thorough shake before tucking it away, all with no visible wince. Jin notes, sourly, that a night's sleep seems to have done him more good than could reasonably have been expected.

"'sides," Mugen continues, "We're done. Finished. We don't owe her a damn thing anymore—not that we ever really did."

"We? From whence this sudden solidarity?" He watches Mugen process this statement; it doesn't take long for the muscles around his eyes to tighten with what is probably comprehension.

"Yeah, man. What the fuck ever," he finally says, and that's even more unsatisfactory than Mugen's usual conversation, and Jin can read even less into it. Then he stalks past Jin and into the hut, tying his trousers as he goes.

After a while, Jin follows.

Another day, and Fuu has found another pretext to go into town, or whatever it is that passes for a town on this island, or wherever it is she goes when she says she's going into town. Perhaps she's out stealing food, or turning tricks. Perhaps she's pacing through a field of sunflowers. Perhaps she does not want to watch him and Mugen sweating, knitting nerve and tendon, staring up at the ceiling.

Jin turns his face into the futon. It probably could have done with an airing before their arrival, and four days and nights of service as a sickbed has done little to improve its aroma. He has slept too much already, but there is always more sleep—dizzy, pale, unnourishing—to be had. A few minutes later, unless it's a few hours, the rustling of Mugen's futon startles him fully awake.

"What are you doing?"

Mugen scowls as if the answer should be obvious, which it actually is: his back itches, and he's scratching it against the bedding.

Idiot, Jin means to say, but what he actually says is, "You'll reopen your wound."

"This shit itches like hell." But Mugen falls still and shoots him a look full of low cunning. Like it would be a betrayal of whatever pirate machismo he mistakes for honor to simply ask.

"Fine," Jin says. And there is only the barest stab of pain as he stands and shuffles across the narrow room, and Mugen has the decency not to insult them both by pretending to be affronted. Jin could almost feel cheerful.

Mugen moans as enthusiastically as he does for food or sex when Jin scratches the itch that he apparently really does have. His shoulder-blades twitch above a long tight spiral of bandages.

"Lower," he grunts, and Jin traces the edge of the bandages with his fingers and does not comply. "Fuck that, just take them off, you cannot begin to imagine how much this itches, it burns, it's like I've got the clap up and down my goddamn spine –" Frustration inspires him to a certain brutish eloquence. Jin has noticed this before.

"We're almost out of fresh bandages. You should wait another day." But Jin is already beginning to unwrap—peel—Mugen, who cranes his head backwards to watch. He can smell stale perspiration—even Mugen wrinkles his less-than-delicate nose—but there's no tell-tale stink of infection.

It was of course Fuu who did the bandaging, competently enough but uneconomically; the bands of cotton crisscross, double and triple back on themselves. When Jin is done Mugen sits like a spindle unspooled, cloth looped loosely beside him. The skin beneath the bandages is moist, and unreasonably pale between the bruises.

"Oh fuck that's so much better." Mugen's sigh segues into something like a whimper as he reaches toward the small of his back. Jin wonders if it is easier for him to allow this small display of pain than to directly ask Jin to touch him. Then he wonders if he is, perhaps, overanalyzing. Then he scratches Mugen's back.

"Yeah, right there."

Jin can feel dead skin not his own accumulating beneath his fingernails. He leans forward to rest his chin on Mugen's shoulder, and looks down. The place where the bullet entered him is a pink and pouting thing, level with his solar plexus. When Jin drops his gaze lower, he is not surprised to see the erection tenting the other man's pants. He keeps scratching, moving his hand in the same slow circle.

"Want to kiss it and make it better?"

Jin raises his head so that Mugen will be sure to see him arch his eyebrow. "I could be persuaded." He can feel the muscles in Mugen's back tense.

There's a certain satisfaction in having made Mugen like this—startled, wary, very still as he ponders his next move. Someone less observant than Jin might think that Mugen is perpetually in motion; Mugen probably thinks it of himself. But Jin has seen that this restlessness is punctuated by moments of paralyzed consideration. The only reason Mugen has lived this long is because he thinks so seldom.

And then Mugen trips right back into his usual rhythm: "Yeah, sure, whatever. Suck my cock, bitch."

Not at all accidentally, Jin jabs Mugen hard in one of his more spectacular bruises as he shifts around to the other side of him. Mugen moves to accommodate him in a way that is wholly unhelpful. Beneath them, the thin futon is starting to bunch in the middle.

Jin settles himself before Mugen's crossed legs, idly contemplating the bony knobs of his ankles as he unlaces the other man's pants. His glasses are slipping down the bridge of his nose, and Mugen's attempt to shove them back up only worsens the situation. He ignores the glasses, ignores the way he is half-on, half-off the futon, and concentrates on taking Mugen's cock in his hand just so.

Their infrequent encounters—Jin can count them on his hands with fingers to spare – have taught him nothing about what Mugen likes in terms of technique, only that a few minutes of vigorous frottage will satisfy him when he has been too long between whores. At least he should be quick, then. Jin smiles as he thinks this, and keeps smiling until his lips are parted.

And then it is only a matter of leaning forward, dabbing his tongue against the eyelid-soft place where Mugen's foreskin has pulled away, and pressing in closer. The muscles in the back of Jin's throat flutter. He has had a sword in him, and this is nothing.

Mugen smells like sweat and aging cotton, tastes like nothing but Jin's own spit, and sounds like he's surfacing from a nightmare. He hisses out a string of half-formed obscenities—that's it, faster, fuck, suck me, your mouth, Jin, in your mouth—that make liquid heat flare in the pit of Jin's gut.

Jin rubs himself against the folds of the futon. He is acutely aware that he must look graceless, absurd. His wounded shoulder is sending pangs of warning all across the muscles of his back. Fuu could be walking up the path on the hill right now—

"Oh, damn," Mugen groans, and suddenly he's clenching both his hands in Jin's hair and grinding his hips up. This is not the first time that Jin has done this, but it has been a very long time, and he cannot remember the indulgences of years past nearly so vividly as he remembers a throat full of seawater. He has to remind himself to swallow.

As soon as Mugen lets go, he sits up and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. His erection, mindlessly demanding, presses against the front of his hakama. Jin readjusts his glasses before he looks over at Mugen, flushed cheeks and toothy grin and all.

"You want some help with that?" The offer is accompanied by a suggestive gesture in the direction of Jin's crotch.

"No." And Jin drops his hands to the fastenings he knows so well, while Mugen watches him out of bright, greedy eyes.

They are both awake, and leaning against the same wall, waiting for Fuu to return.

"This is it," Mugen says. "The last night. Finito." He's prodding at the edges of his wound, a little too thoroughly for Jin to believe that the motion is mere fidgeting. He wants to tell Mugen to stop, but it's too hot to quarrel. He makes a vague noise that might be agreement.

Early evening has flooded the room with a murky half-light. Beneath the gathering shadows, there is the inescapable fact of the island. Less than a week here, and already Jin can't quite remember what the world was like when it wasn't overlaid by the grinding of the surf, the faint sting of salt. Mugen, he thinks, must have grown up in a place very much like this.