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There are many debates about what constitutes a true story. Some say it’s the action—the fighting, fencing, torture, revenge, adventure on the high seas. Some say it’s about the journey, the character growth, the hardships weathered and surpassed in triumph, a little older, a little wiser. Some say it’s true love and miracles that make a story. But in the end, it is not for any one person to say what makes a story for everyone else. A true tale is one which you feel in your bones and your breath and the hummingbird beat of your pulse. One which sinks into the rushing of your veins and spreads through you slow and summersweet.
But most importantly, you never know it is a story until you have reached the end.
Their story did not have a beginning. Most stories don’t—they simply pick up at a convenient point, a break to allow for entrance and immersion. There was never a time when Todoroki Fuyumi and Usagiyama Rumi’s story began. There was not a clear point of the before and after they fell in love. They simply were, and as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they always had been. They just hadn’t realized it yet.
And so this is where we enter their tale: the eldest daughter of a lowly noble who finds her joy in her morning rides, and the stablehand who tends to her father’s horses. Today, Fuyumi’s ride was hard and fast, a reckless gallop intended to let the wind pull the tears she must otherwise never shed from her burning eyes. Last night had been worse than most—it was her mother’s birthday, after all.
(She refuses to think of Todoroki Rei as late or dear or departed, not like everyone else. Pretending her mother is dead will ease Fuyumi’s hurt no more or less than her father’s anger or her younger brothers’ tears. Her mother is not gone, she is broken.
There is a difference.)
It was a day of tension and buildup, and a night where tempers snapped and crackled and burned, and Fuyumi, ever the rock, ever the anchor, cannot let herself feel anything until the shadow has edged back into the night and she has torn across their estate four times over until her throat is raw from the winter air and her mare lathered in sweat.
She approaches the stables at a walk, breath still raspy and cheeks like apples in the midmorning frosts, not yet melted by the white winter sun. As her mare draws near, Fuyumi spies the stablegirl stretched out on a bale of hay just outside the door, sprawled in the weak sunlight and slowly devouring a small pile of dried apple slices. Heaven knows where a stablegirl acquired such a thing, but Fuyumi cannot even muster suspicion in the face of her fascination.
Fuyumi has only truly encountered the woman in the predawn mists, blurred and indistinct by the dimness and the fog. She’s never seen her in full day before, and the way the sunlight slides over her warm skin is like oil anointing one of the bronze sculptures Fuyumi has studied in her textbooks.
She’s breathtaking, to put it frankly. But not the kind of beauty that Fuyumi has associated with her mother all her life—porcelain and soft hands and delicate lace. This woman is the beauty you find in strong things like the steel of a sword or the richness of the earth itself, in the callouses of well-worked hands and muscles outlined in effort and true strength. It is a different type of beauty than the nobles favor altogether, and that fascinates Todoroki Fuyumi to an unexpected extent.
The woman’s eyes open as the clip-clop of Fuyumi’s steed draws nearer, and she sits up in a smooth motion that casts a hook into Fuyumi’s lungs and tugs gently at the breath waiting there. She wants to say something but finds—quite to her shame—that she does not know the woman’s name.
“Fair morning,” she offers instead, hoping her embarrassment doesn’t show on her face.
“Fair morning, m’lady,” the stablegirl returns, and something about the way she says the title—holds it behind her teeth and savors it, pushes warmth to creep into Fuyumi’s chest. “Hard ride today?”
She says it like a question, but not to ask about the speed or difficulty of Fuyumi’s ride. One glance into her dark, knowing eyes is assurance enough of that.
“Yes, I suppose it was.” Fuyumi dismounts, feeling silly sitting there atop a horse and looking down on the other woman’s sprawled form, but once her boots are firmly planted on the muddy, hoof-churned ground, she finds that she has nothing to do with her hands. She settles for stroking at her mare’s neck for the moment.
Silence settles between them, long enough that Fuyumi can hear the gunshot splinter of an ice-laden tree branch snapping somewhere in the forest. It is fast becoming the kind of silence she would do anything to fill.
“I’m sorry to say this, but may I ask your name?” she finally blurts, all in a rush. The words are a tangle, snagging at her tongue in her haste to say them, rather than her usual learned and clear enunciation.
The woman grins, propping her chin in her hand, knee on her elbow. She looks like a masterpiece just waiting to be painted.
“Don’t be sorry, m’lady,” she says. “You can call me bunny if you like. I’ve always had a thing for pet names.”
She winks, and Fuyumi’s cheeks are hot enough that the air ought to be steaming against them.
The woman’s long white locks tumble in a tangle across her shoulders from where they are tied up behind her head, and Fuyumi, desperate for distraction from her own furious blushing, has an odd urge to comb her fingers through that hair, to unknot the snarls and tame it into smoothness.
Perhaps it is better off wild, though—there is a kind of dangerous beauty in the wild things.
“Shall we make a trade, then?” she proposes, attempting to regain her composure. “I’ll tell you my name and you tell me yours?”
“I already know your name, m’lady,” the woman laughs, and Fuyumi flushes further. “But I’ll accept your terms.”
“Well-met,” Fuyumi says as primly as she can manage. “I am Todoroki Fuyumi.”
“Well-met, Todoroki Fuyumi,” replies the woman, grin widening. “You can call me Rumi. Usagiyama Rumi.”
Fuyumi has never had someone speak so glibly to her, so perhaps that is why she says it.
“You may call me Fuyumi.”
“Well, Fuyumi,” says Usagiyama Rumi, “would you like me to put up that mare, or did you want to stand out in the cold all day?”
Fuyumi is fully scarlet now, and no cheeks nipped to roses by the cold can hide it.
“If you’d be so kind,” she manages.
“As you wish.” Rumi bows with a sweeping flourish of her arms and stands to take the reins. Her fingers brush against Fuyumi’s, warm and rough, and something about that simple touch is electric enough to make Fuyumi's breath hitch.
That grin unfurls even further, and something about it draws Todoroki Fuyumi in. Rumi is quick-tongued and quick to smile, words seemingly always ready on her lips, and something tiny is flickering to life in Fuyumi’s chest, whispering what else might that mouth do?
☸
(Two weeks later, Rumi kisses her in the hay, wild and fierce and rough hands cupping her jaw with an incomprehensible gentleness, and Fuyumi thinks oh.
That’s what.)
☸
There is a dangerous kind of bliss to loving Rumi, Fuyumi finds. Early mornings are their time together, when the predawn glow limns cheekbones and fingertips and eyelashes in gold leaf, when Rumi kisses Fuyumi like a lioness and Fuyumi fearlessly buries her hands in the wild white tangle of her hair. When the barn is their church, a holy sanctum of hay and mist and the comforting noises of horses all around.
Fingers on wrists, palms on cheeks, lips against lips and hot breath huffed from a sly smile ghosting across chilled skin.
Fuyumi thinks she could get lost in this woman if she wanted. Or even if she didn’t.
They’re lying in the hay one morning, after Fuyumi has come in from her ride, in those precious few moments before she must return to tidy herself and take up embroidery, calligraphy, all the proper things for a woman of her station. Rumi’s fingers are tangled with Fuyumi’s, her calloused palm warm and sure, and when she opens her mouth, everything comes spinning to a stop—earth and sky and tides and stars, all of it laid to waste by words from Usagiyama Rumi’s lips.
“I’m leaving,” she says, dark eyes staring at the dust motes that waltz above them in the sunbeams.
“What?” whispers Fuyumi. Rumi is silent for a moment, fingers tightening near-imperceptibly around Fuyumi’s.
“For the harbors,” she finally continues. “I’ve arranged work on a merchant ship for six months.”
(Once, before her mother crumbled and her father snapped and she lost one brother and saw two others retreat into themselves, Fuyumi saw a circus in the capitol. There was a girl, no older than her, swathed in colorful silk and scandalous tights, shedding flower petals from far, far above on the high wire. She walked sure and slow and careful, and yet at any moment she could have wobbled, trembled, and plunged to the earth.
Fuyumi’s life has always been like that. A delicate balance upon a highwire, ready to fall at the slightest misstep.
This feels like a wobble.)
She can’t bring herself to ask why, can only remember to breathe as her hands begin to shake.
Fingers trace softly over her collarbone, and Fuyumi wants to cry. (She doesn’t. She never does.)
“Just for six months, m’lady,” Rumi whispers, pressing her mouth to the spot her fingers had been. “Enough to make my fortune. Then I can take you away from here, and even your father can’t stop us.”
Her father, who only cares about advancing his status, about the family name, about money and power. Her father, who would never let her marry a stablehand. But a merchant? It’s a faint hope, but Fuyumi clings to it nonetheless.
“Swear you’ll come back to me,” she murmurs into Rumi’s hair, eyes trained on the barn rafters lest her brimming tears overflow into the hay.
“As you wish,” Rumi whispers against Fuyumi’s collarbone.
It sounds like I love you.
☸
(Rumi leaves before dawn two days later, satchel swung across her shoulder and hair as wild as ever. Fuyumi watches her go, and then she rides harder than she has since that fateful wintry morn that Rumi’s quicksilver smile captivated her.
When she receives word not a month later of the pirate attack, the infamous Dread Pirate Mirko destroying the merchant ship and killing all aboard, Fuyumi does not ride. She sits in the barn and weeps.)
☸
In her numbness, Fuyumi can’t find it in herself to be surprised when her father hands her a roll of parchment stamped with the royal crest and declares her to be betrothed to the Prince Shigaraki. He’s been vying for the prince to take her hand for months now, and in her short-lived bliss of hay and thundering hooves and kisses stolen behind splintering barn walls, Fuyumi had chosen to ignore it. It hadn’t seemed likely to succeed; after all, she was simply a nobleman’s daughter, and Shigaraki was the prince of the kingdom.
She has forgotten, it seems, how persistent her father can be.
The parchment crinkles in her shaking hands as she sits by the window, watching the sun creep closer to the horizon. Winter has melted into a spring bursting with new budding life, and summer is to bring their wedding amongst blooming flowers and ripening fruit. Fuyumi stares at the curling ink script until it blurs and her eyes burn, and she feels nothing but barrenness.
She looks at the horses grazing in the pastures, remembers a lioness’s smile and sure fingers on her neck. Dark eyes and a promise whispered against skin and bone and raw, beating heart in the hushed quiet of the barn. She thinks of the rumors of the black sails of the ship Luna Tijeras, out there somewhere on the seas, carrying aboard it the pirate who took Rumi and her dark eyes and quick smile and her promises away from Fuyumi.
For the first time in a long time, Todoroki Fuyumi feels something through the numbness.
Determination.
☸
She tries to sneak out one night, just before the late hours roll sleepily into the early, when the sun is just an idea the horizon is contemplating.
Predictably, Shouto catches her.
He’s observant, her little brother, always keeping an eye out for her, but not in the way their father does. There’s no malice or prying behind his gaze. People might say Shouto looks like Enji, but he’s nothing like their father, not in any of the ways that matter. He cares. So when she sneaks into the barn with satchel in hand, dressed in stolen breeches, to find Shouto, arms folded, waiting before her mare’s moonlit-bathed stall, Fuyumi can’t help but breathe a sigh of something that tastes a little like apprehension but quite a lot more like relief.
“Little brother,” she starts, white-knuckled grip trembling around her satchel’s strap.
Shouto holds up a hand. “I’m here to help.”
And that’s all it takes to split the Gordian knot of anxiety tangling in her ribs. They ride out together, and Fuyumi tilts her face up to the light of the setting moon and finally, finally tells him of a stable girl with gentle hands and a heart as wild as any horse. For just a moment, she doesn’t feel anger or loss or sadness. She simply feels content.
☸
The first mate of the Luna Tijeras is golden-eyed and golden-haired, and he leans lazily against the mainmast, regarding Fuyumi and Shouto with vague interest and a single arched brow as they reach the top of the gangplank.
“And who might you be?” he asks, pushing off the mast to swagger towards them across the deck. There’s a sword at his hip and an air of coiled danger about him, like the stalking of a cat, or a snake preparing to strike.
“I’m here to bargain an audience with your captain,” Fuyumi says, and it hits her right about now how very little she has thought this through.
“I didn’t ask what business you had, little lady,” he replies. “I asked who you are."
Shouto stirs uncomfortably beside her, but Fuyumi places two fingers against his wrist. She lifts her chin. “I am Todoroki Fuyumi, and I seek an audience with your captain.”
Clearly, he recognizes the Todoroki name, because he tilts his head, eyes glinting with a different kind of danger—curiosity.
“What’s a girl like you doing aboard a ship like the Tijeras?” he muses.
Fuyumi grits her teeth. “I want to duel Mirko.”
“That’s Captain Mirko to you,” comes a bright voice, and all three of them jerk round to see a masked figure standing at the railing of the quarterdeck. Her face is shaded by the brim of her hat, but Fuyumi can make out a scar curving down the right side of her face and wisps of white hair curling out around her cheekbones and jaw. Even if her imposing presence didn’t give her away, the mask does.
“The Dread Pirate Mirko,” Fuyumi breathes, and Mirko tips her head. A strand of hair curls against her elegant neck.
“As I said, poppet,” she grins, “it’s Captain.”
Fuyumi grits her teeth. “Well, Captain, I am Todoroki Fuyumi and I’m here to challenge you to a duel.”
“A duel?” Mirko asks, sounding almost surprised. “Why?”
“I hardly think you need my reasons in order to swordfight me.”
“I’d like them nonetheless.”
“And if I won’t give them to you?” Fuyumi asks, and Mirko’s eyes flash.
“Then I won’t duel you.”
Shouto touches her wrist, mutters her name, but Fuyumi shakes him off. “Fine. You killed the woman I love, and I want to hear your dying breath as payment for your crimes.”
The pirate’s eyes flash, but not with anger. There’s something else there, something Fuyumi doesn’t quite have a name for. (She’s not sure she wants to know what it is. Hunger? Interest? Passion? All the possibilities scare her.)
“That’s quite a commitment you have there,” Mirko says, leaping up and over the railing to land on the deck with all the grace of a rabbit.
Look up at the moon, m’lady, Rumi once whispered in her ear one stolen night, breath pluming against Fuyumi’s skin in icy mist. Do you see the moon rabbit? The moon rabbit. See how she leaps across the night sky.
“What makes you think an attempt at revenge is worth sacrificing your life for?” Her face is very close to Fuyumi’s, close enough that she can make out the long white lashes around the captain’s eyes, close enough that each scar on her neck, her cheek, curling from behind her left ear, are on proud display.
Fuyumi smiles thinly. “I died when she did. I may as well get some satisfaction out of being stuck here.”
Mirko tips her head again, studying Fuyumi like she’s the most interesting thing in the world, some curio from distant lands, across ocean and mountain untread.
“Join my crew,” she says, and it sounds more like a command than an invitation.
"What?” Shouto and the first mate gasp at the same time, sounding startled and somewhat horrified.
Mirko runs a finger along Fuyumi’s neck, tilting her chin up so their gazes lock, and Fuyumi swats her hand away angrily.
“I am not a horse to be examined,” she snaps. “And I’m not joining your damned crew.”
The captain tuts. “If you join and prove yourself worthy, maybe I’ll let you duel me.”
“Maybe?” says Shouto, skeptical.
“What do I have to do to prove myself?” Fuyumi asks, folding her arms.
Mirko grins. “Try doing everything I say, for a start. We’ll go from there.”
“Fuyumi,” says Shouto, but Fuyumi has her mind made up, and she can tell that he knows that just by looking at her. Instead of saying anything further, he squeezes her wrist gently and sighs. “Would one of you mind roughing me up, then?”
At the first mate’s confused look, he rolls his eyes.
“Well I’ve got to make the abduction story look convincing, now don’t I?”
☸
(“I wasn’t always a pirate, you know,” Mirko tells her one night. She’s perched up in the rigging like a bird about to take flight, still awake even though it’s Fuyumi’s watch. Fuyumi thinks she ought to be disgruntled about that, but really she’s just grateful for the company, even if it’s her. The sea can be a terribly lonely place at night.
Fuyumi hums slightly, eyes sweeping the horizon, and tries to pretend her curiosity isn’t sitting up behind her sternum like a bright-eyed cat.
“I was a lot of things in my life,” the pirate continues, and Fuyumi gives in to the words tickling the backs of her teeth.
“Like what?”
In the darkness, she can’t tell, but Fuyumi thinks Mirko’s eyes sparkle.
“I was a smuggler, and a bartender, and a horse trainer. I was a lion tamer, for a day.”
“A day?”
“A lion ate the ringmaster on the second. Not my fault, of course—”
“Oh, of course. ”
“—but I wasn’t exactly popular, after that.”
Despite herself, Fuyumi giggles. Mirko seems to take that as encouragement to continue.
“I’ve been a hunter, an apothecary, and a fighter in an underground ring. I was even a stable girl.”
A stable girl…
(White hair and a brighter grin, calloused hands so gentle on her own, dark eyes warmer than mulled wine on a frosty night.) Fuyumi’s smile fades, and she returns her gaze to the horizon, tucking a stray lock of hair back into place.
Neither of them speaks, after that. The watch passes in silence.)
☸
After days of suspense, the duel happens quite suddenly, all things considered.
It’s a blur, really; one moment Mirko is stabbing a screaming eel through the eye, pinning it to the deck with her blade, turning to Fuyumi with a smirk to say do you think your stable girl could have done that, m’lady? and the next, something has snapped inside of her and she yanks Keigo’s sword from his hip before he can react and launches herself as Mirko.
“You,” she huffs, bringing the blade down again and again, clashing and clanging with the pirate’s own, “have no right to speak of her.”
“And why not?” challenges Mirko, a flurry of strikes driving Fuyumi backwards, causing her to stumble. “After all, didn’t you go and get betrothed to the prince?” She sneers as Fuyumi falters, leaning her shoulder inwards to try to fend off the other woman’s sheer strength. “Perhaps I did your Rumi a favor, then, making it so she never had to see how unfaithful you truly are!”
Fuyumi screams, throwing her full weight at Mirko, swinging in a frenzy. The pirate’s eyes widen.
“I died that day,” she yells, voice splintering and breaking through the rage and the tears and the firewhite glint of sun on sea and metal. “She was my everything and you took her from me! Do you think I wanted to marry the prince? Do you think I rejoiced in the news of her passing? I did not ride for weeks! I laid in my bed and I wept because"—and here, the clanging of blades punctuates each word—“she was the thing I loved most about myself.”
Mirko’s eyes widen and she backs up a step, then another, faltering under the rage of Fuyumi’s onslaught. Hell hath no fury, the proverb goes, like a woman scorned.
Todoroki Fuyumi is not quite scorned, though. She is hurting and broken and ravaged, and the woman at fault for that stands in front of her, and suddenly Fuyumi swings and her opponent’s rapier clatters away, ringing like a death knell as it strikes the deck once, twice, thrice, and rolls to a quiet stop at the boots of the surrounding crew. Suddenly, the tip of Fuyumi’s sword rests elegantly against the smooth column of Mirko’s throat.
(Suddenly, Fuyumi feels almost sick.)
“You took away the most important thing in the world,” Fuyumi gasps out, shoulders heaving with each breath. Is her throat tight from the fight, or from tears? Is that sweat in her eyes, or is there another reason why they’re burning? “You killed her. She broke her promise and it’s all your fault.”
“What would you have me do?” Mirko asks, voice oddly subdued as those bright eyes bore into her own.
“I would have you die,” whispers Fuyumi, “and when you see her on the other side, tell her that I loved her more than life itself.”
She draws back the blade, ready to drive it forwards, but the Dread Pirate Mirko does not move. She simply stands, hands folded, feet apart, chin tipped proudly back. And then she opens her mouth, and her words change everything.
“As you wish.”
The sword clatters to the deck as the force of recognition slams into Fuyumi, leaving her weightless, breathless, trembling.
“Rumi?” she whispers, but how can it be true? She takes one shaking step forwards, and her legs give out. Strong arms catch her, cradle her against a body so familiar and yet so foreign it leaves her almost dizzy.
Wonderingly, Fuyumi gazes into the pirate captain’s dark eyes and reaches up to untie the mask that Mirko has not once shed since Fuyumi boarded at their last port. Mirko makes no move to stop her, and as the dark fabric falls away, Fuyumi thinks she lets out a sob, or something like it.
It’s Rumi, in all her glory, all her tousled hair and lion’s grin, new scars mapped out over her skin, roads to stories unknown. Fuyumi wants to learn them all by heart.
“Well-met, Todoroki Fuyumi,” whispers Usagiyama Rumi. “I’m afraid I was gone a bit longer than I planned.”
Fuyumi chuckles wetly. “I think that can be excused. You’ve gained a ship and crew in your absence, so it seems.”
“So it does,” grins Rumi, and something warm settles in Fuyumi’s chest, growing to fill the empty void it once held. “But I’m missing something, I think.”
“Oh?” She can’t hide the way her voice rises a half step or two as Rumi’s hands settle firmly around her waist.
Rumi hums. “I seem to recall promising to return to a certain noblewoman, and here I am.”
Here you are, thinks Fuyumi, breathless and wondering. My Rumi. Here you are.
“How would you like to see the world, Todoroki Fuyumi?”
“I think,” says Fuyumi, gazing into the eyes of a stable-girl-turned-pirate, “I would like nothing more.”
☸
(Later, Fuyumi will demand answers, and Rumi will gladly give them.
“It’s funny, you know,” she’ll say, grinning that easy smile of hers. “The previous Dread Pirate Mirko wasn’t named Mirko either—she was named Ryuko. Before her was Nana, and heaven knows who came before her.”
Fuyumi will giggle as Rumi nudges her, wiggling her eyebrows dramatically.
“Ryuko put me to work swabbing the deck every day after she captured my ship, and she never did make good on her threats to kill me. One day she decided she wanted to retire, and took me into her cabin to offer me a job. Now I’ve got a ship and a crew and a very dramatic hat, if I do say so myself.”
Fuyumi will poke the brim of the hat, snorting. “Dramatic is one word for it.”
And there will be mock offense and silly banter, and Rumi will hold Fuyumi’s hand, fingers entwined, and place a featherlight kiss on her cheek, and things will be right in the world. Later, there will be much swashbuckling and adventure, many more swordfights and screaming eels, and even rodents of a most unusual size.
But for now?
Now, it is the end of the story, as far as stories can have an end. For now there is the ocean and the setting sun and two women sailing to freedom, hand in rope-roughened hand, and that is enough.)