FIC: Bun (1/1, Gintama)
bun
snapshots from Kagura's early years.
1489 words; 1/1
Kagura was born in the first shiver of autumn. It had been raining all night, leaving the city blind with fog when dawn arrived. Calling a doctor was out of the question. The road to the city's capital stretched miles, and the water had left the road too dangerous for wheeled transport. No sane mind, and certainly no respectable doctor, would travel their neighborhood if they could help it.
While Ira huffed and panted on their couch, swearing murders at every name in their telephone book, Umibozu shedding half the hair on his head in panic, Kamui calmly got up from his bed, swallowed his breakfast, and climbed to the second floor's window. He came back dragging the pharmacist who lived upstairs.
Wen was sixty-three, but the coke-bottle glasses made him look about eighty, with a few additional years impressed by the perpetual frown on his forehead. To Umibozu's surprise, he didn't seem at all worried about the situation.
"Well, this is bound to happen, since you're a new family and all." Wen said sagely, hands clasped behind his back. "There's a first time for everything. Kitchen appliances are going to get even more advanced, now that electric cookers have become commonplace in the cities. Anyway, as long as it is edible, who cares if it comes out a little too crispy?"
Umibozu eyed Wen warily. Has the old man gone mad, after all?
"Kamui-kun said you need help taking out a bun from the oven," Wen said, sounding very much amused.
In the end, the pharmacist did deliver the baby.
-
In the nine months she slept inside Ira, Kagura made quite a strong impression. She kicked, she jumped, she sommersaulted. She committed herself to the Olympics.
"A baby can't sommersault," protested Ira. Umibozu kept his observation journal hidden after that.
The womb period was filled with so much activity, Umibozu had little trouble figuring out Kagura's likes and dislikes. Kagura hated morning televisions, bad weather, and Kamui's singing. She liked her mother's melodious recitation of languages, from those spoken by their neighbors to strange foreign sounds from far-flung planets. She also liked sour food. Umibozu found himself buying baskets and baskets of sweet-sour candies, which Ira consumed-inhaled, almost-with alarming speed.
She's going to be an energetic child, said pretty much everyone. A hell-raiser. He shared this belief. Kagura would announce her arrival into the world by a lot of screeching and crying and yelling and perhaps even yodelling.
Little did he know, his daughter had a knack for proving everyone wrong.
Kagura was as quiet as a mouse the day she was born, and the day after, and the day after that, and every day that followed for the next twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six months. Doctors were summoned and theories were hashed, from the likely to the improbable.
"She's not turning into a custard bun because you keep calling her one, Kamui. More like, she is secretly plotting to eat you."
His wife had a taste for horrible, morbid jokes.
-
Springtime carried the scent of persimmons and mischief.
Kamui at eight and a half was restless, boundless energy. Long weeks cooped up inside their house, reading cookbooks and staring at the window showing nothing but drab grey, had twice doubled his appetite for trouble, and the arrival of a little sister and future accomplice further lit his spirit.
"So what if she is a little quiet?" Kamui reasoned with a mouth full of sticky rice. "Kagura can cartwheel better than Daigo next door. Also, she can eat ten bowls of rice!"
The profundity of the argument was somewhat weakened by rice bits sticking stubbornly to his cheeks.
As the trees blossomed and the flowers bloomed, so did the tales of the siblings' misadventures. They began ambitiously with a failed attempt at running away with a grocer's cart full of apples. They would have been successful if the grocer hadn't noticed his apples sneezing and, in a fit of surprise, released the cart at an unopportune moment. It tumbled down the brick steps that stretched from the market to the river, and somehow the siblings ended up on a rooftop three blocks away, wet as a rat and enthusiastically eating half-ripe apples which, by way of justice and cautionary tales, end up giving them a matching case of diarrhea.
Then there were the attempt at stealing bananas from the neighbors' garden, followed by another affair in which they were nearly accused as a serial underwear thief, followed by another in which they won a bet against a rich foreigner who hadn't thought it possible that two toddlers can eat an oil drum full of rice in under ten minutes. Then there were the troubles with a lowlife who wanted to kidnap Kagura. He left their city swearing off the crook's way of life, wearing a pair of crutches, twenty-four stitches, boot and cast for his broken leg, a generous supply of bandages and terrifying anecdotes about tiny Yato toddlers.
In this very adventurous year, Kagura kicked, fought, laughed, sobbed, yelped, and committed all sorts of acrobatic feats. More importantly, she talked. There was 'brother' and 'mami' and 'rice' and 'egg' and 'more!' and 'less sauce, please' and the occassional non-sequiturs from television dramas and science education channels.
Absent was the word 'papi.'
-
(The first time she called him 'Papi', it was raining, and her eyes were filled with fright. She'd stopped him from becoming his worst nightmare-the kind of Yato who would kill their own loved ones simply because their blood told them to. Amazing that a single word could be the saving of two lives.)
-
Kagura was not the first name they picked, nor the twentieth. Umibozu had ideas, drawn from mythologies of the strong and the powerful among their clan. Ira had a list of her own, ten times longer than his. Names of princesses and warriors, queens and knights, rebels and conquerors, poets and scientists, scrawled in neat cursives, ready for selection. Kamui's contribution was no less extensive, despite its narrow focus. Custard, Peanut Butter, Sunny Side Up, Chocolate Sprinkles-
"Your sister is not food, Kamui," chided Umibozu.
-
Umibozu loved his wife because she was strong in mind and body. Not only can she can triumph easily in a brawl, she had the thirst for knowledge he lacked. Theirs was a clan with a destructive pride, believing their blood and their strength and their way of living superior to others. Ira believed differently. While Earth was fighting a pointless battle against the forces of the Coalition, Ira began recording and reading books written in the Samurai's language.
"What a waste," Umibozu overheard Wen saying. "Such a beautiful planet, such finite life. In ten weeks, there would be nothing left of it."
"Do you believe so?" Ira responded. "I believe they will outlast us. They love their planet enough to defend it. We do our best to occupy every inch of ours with graves."
Ira had just finished reading the tale of Kaguya-hime to Kamui when another brawl broke out a few doors away. The neighbors bolted their doors and drew their curtains, and Umibozu patrolled the block but as ever, it was too late.
The boy was sixteen or seventeen, his braided hair caked with dried blood. Umibozu tried not to think of little Kamui, and the future that lay await for his children.
-
Winter arrived, carrying Kagura's first clap with pneumonia. Kagura never did things half-heartedly. In this case, it meant buckets filled with green, smelly liquid and fever that climbed to alarming degrees. Everyone panicked.
Kamui collected food from their neighbors. Rice balls, fruits, breads, tinned meat and vegetables. They took turns watching her all night. Kamui, usually the first to yawn after sundown, insisted on staying up too. And so they were, until sometime before dawn. They had all fallen asleep, sprawled in various undignified positions across the couch and on the floor, when Kagura woke up and went to pee. She noticed the stove almost burning, turned it off, mopped the porridge spill on the floor, brushed her teeth, and climbed back to bed. Her fever sorted itself up the next morning, and she decided she was well enough to deliver a short lecture over breakfast.
"Adults shouldn't leave stoves burning," she declared. "It is dangerous."
-
Years later, sitting at Edo's space terminal, Kagura's heartfelt letter tucked safely inside his coat, he would remember that little moment, and the important lesson he had overlooked for many years. Even as they worried and fussed over Kagura, she had always been the one to save them all at the end of the day.
-
a basket of persimmons for a farmer's luck,
amaranth tied with strings for spirit that never wilts,
a bowl of soup for a cherishing soul in troubled times,
and a butterfly's wings for a life richly lived.