"The Mishap" - female kyuzo drabble
Disclaimer: I don’t own S7. Nope.
Warnings: Female Kyuzo, mentions of violence.
I won’t say this drabble specifically ties in with ‘The Game’, but I won’t say it doesn’t. Which means I have no idea what I’m doing. I just had fun with this one. It's a little rough, so I might edit it later.
I always wondered what sort of mishaps Kyuzo might have had while she was young and more inexperienced. This would be sometime during the war. Since Kyuzo was about 30 in the anime, I would put her at about 16 now.
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What had Sensei told her about falling off cliffs? Kyuzo tried to ignore the blood currently rushing to her head as she struggled to remember his advice.
Ah, yes. He said, “Don’t.”
Wonderful advice.
Although she wasn’t really falling off a cliff. Technically, she was dangling upside down over the edge of a cliff, a few hundred (thousand?) feet above the ground. Sensei had never mentioned this specific scenario.
It wasn’t really her fault. Everything had been going just fine!
The battle was nearly over and Kyuzo had cut off a group of samurai who were trying to escape over the cliff. How they planned to do that, she didn’t know, but she had four of them down before they even knew what was happening. The last one had scrambled around the edge of a crashed airship, inching along the side in an attempt to get…well, somewhere…
Now this was where the day started to go downhill.
Just at that moment, a smaller airship had sped by dangerously close to the cliff face, mere feet from the two samurai. The wind from it had ripped both warriors off the ledge, out into open air.
Instead of plummeting hundreds of feet to her death, or at least severe injury, her body jerked to a halt in mid-air when something caught her foot. Her target had continued to fall, screaming like a girl as he went.
So there she was, dangling upside down from the underside of the airship. A wire had caught her right foot between itself and the long pole it was attached to.
So…there she was. Hanging there, staring at the upside down world. Feeling like a complete idiot.
Kyuzo had never been afraid of heights, but she had to admit that the way the other warrior’s body splattered against the rocks did concern her a little bit. She tried bending at the waist and grabbing the pole with her hands so that she could move her foot, but it refused to budge. The wire was the only thing keeping the pole suspended, so cutting either that or the pole was out of the question.
And she was pretty certain that she would not survive the fall.
What do you do right before your death? Go over fond memories? Regrets? Did she actually regret anything to start with? Were you supposed to have regrets?
The only thing that came to mind was when she accidentally underpaid for a piece of fruit and the vendor didn’t catch it. That was a start.
“I regret--.” She started to say, but a small door in the hull of the ship abruptly slid open. A head of tangled orange hair and a face mostly covered by thick goggles peered out of the darkness at her.
The two stared at each other in silence. Kyuzo was trying to figure out exactly what sort of creature was before her, and the creature was trying to decide whether or not to help the samurai.
It’s a damn Goblin. Kyuzo finally decided.
Said ‘Goblin’ opened his mouth, possibly to ask who she was, or if she needed help. Kyuzo never heard a word as the roar of a ship approached.
That same airship whipped by again. The wind ruffled her hair and forced her body to sway with it. There was a yelp as the ‘Goblin’ fell back into the darkness of the ship. A few thuds later, the door slid shut again.
That damned airship.
She knew it was the same one. That dark-skinned idiot in green was still next to the cockpit.
She glared at it as it flew away. Whoever was flying that thing was either drunk or simply inept. Aside from that, the moron standing on the hull had come within a foot of cracking heads with her. She could still see him, his light attire standing out against the dark ship.
If she ever saw that samurai again, or the pilot, she was going inflict massive amounts of pain on both of them.
If she lived.
All things considered, it could be worse. The ‘Goblin’ could have been an enemy, so perhaps he had been about to shoot her. Or he had been about to help her. Probably the latter. At least Sensei wasn’t here to see this. How disappointed would he be to see his student in such a situation?
“Kyuzo?” She grimaced and craned her neck around so she could see the figure in red above her. Well, shit.
“Sensei.” At least he didn’t look disappointed. No, the bastard was grinning at her.
“And here I thought you were dead,” Sensei said as he hopped onto the metal pole and started walking out to her position. It dipped under his weight, but still held. “Instead I find you hanging out down here.”
“Will you please just help me?” Kyuzo snapped.
Sensei sighed and went to work on freeing her. Kyuzo waited patiently, though inside she was seething. She had a clear view of the samurai on the ship when he went by. Dark skin, long hair.
Handsome, too. A voice in the back of her mind spoke up. She ignored that. Who cared if the man was handsome? He would be less handsome once she had his head on a pike.
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13 years later…
“I am Shimada Kambei, may I have the honor of knowing your name?”
“Kyuzo.” She decided there was nothing wrong with giving her name. This dark ronin wouldn’t be alive long enough to use it for anything.
“I ask only because I know you’re samurai.”
Well, aren’t we a know-it-all piece of --! Kyuzo decided to ignore the part of her that wanted to skip any more circling and just kill the man. Instead, she studied him. His description had been fairly accurate. Dark skin, long hair.
Handsome…
End
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As said, these are mostly drabbles. Some might be this long, others might be way longer.
I figured there had to be a time when Kyuzo made some mistakes.
Mostly I just wanted to use the advice about not falling off cliffs.