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Rien never stops smiling.
It is not an overly wide smile, but something placid that sits upon his expression, curling the corners of his lips ever so slightly. Yoshihide has never once seen this smile falter.
She thinks that if she glances at him sidelong enough times, that she’ll catch him in the act, catch the second his mask slips, if only for a moment.
She thinks she’s slick.
She should know better.
“Do you think your dad is that handsome, sweetie?”
Yoshihide scowls instinctively, eyes narrowing as she looks at him head-on as if to dare him to say it again.
The thing is—
He isn’t wrong. She doesn’t know quite how old Rien is, but he has to be at the very least around forty, her earliest memories colored by that same gentle smile baring down upon her, some toy in hand. The long years spent at the House of Spiders have seen Valencina and Matthias’s eyes harbor tell-tale wrinkles of age around them. Even Callisto’s prosthetic body shows signs of wear, especially around his joints. And though she isn’t allowed to see the Dihui Star’s face, when she forgoes her gloves to truly feel her blade, the wrinkled, leathery hands that grip her odachi while training are a testament to the flow of time.
It’s like time has stood still for Rien and Rien alone. His features are, and have always been, finely sculpted with his high cheekbones and gently sloping nose, long lashes decorating his piercing yellow eyes, clever as a fox’s.
Yes, the only sign of age are the white strands that pepper his dark hair, but she has her doubts about these as well, the white in his hair — like his smile — something that lives in perpetuity in her memories.
Less than handsome, beautiful would be a more accurate term for her father.
She would rather die than admit this.
“You’re always smiling.”
Unwilling to hunt for some lie, she tells him the truth.
“Mm, am I?”
“You are. You’re smiling right now.”
She reaches out, thumb and middle fingers splayed to tug at the corners of his mouth with one hand, as if the size of her hand — now that of a woman’s — would camouflage the childishness of the action.
She only means to mess with the edges of his mouth, trying to pull them this way and that to see Rien with a different expression, but her thumb slips, sliding across his plush bottom lip, soft, softer than her calloused hands.
Her heart jumps in its cage, and she thinks Rien will make another of his jokes, but he stays still, looking at her.
“Are you happy, Dad?”
“Of course, sweetheart. I’m always happy when you’re here with me.”
She wonders if that’s true. She wonders if he smiles like this for the other Nursefathers, too.
“Eyes up, Ticket. Your form is sloppy today.”
Yoshihide’s eyes narrow. She knows Valencina’s timing. Even with her eyes closed, as long as she knows what kind of swing the old boozehound is going for, she can feel the time it takes for the arc to complete, the distance between a thrust, Point A to Point B, the velocity, the milliseconds hanging rife in the air, waiting to be parried, cut short, killed.
Time, timing, is always a thread, winding around and around, waiting to be—
Severed.
Yoshihide lashes forth, her sheath cutting a straight line and not an arc, except—
At the edges—
Her sword curving ever so slightly.
Not a mean line, but a placid smile drawn in the air. The arc makes it sloppy. The arc makes it ever so slightly unpredictable.
Instead of clashing with Valencina, the tip of her sheath catches Valencina’s blade at an odd angle, and even though her Nursefather retains fine form, a solid grip, perhaps this solidity is what makes her wrist twist awkwardly from the exchange.
“Goddamn motherfucker,” Valencina hisses as she hops back, just out of range of Yoshihide’s next swing, too slow, a hair of a millisecond off. Valencina scowls, adjusting her grip and rolling her wrist slowly, sword making odd figures in the air, still clenched in her hand.
Consummate professional, even when wasted. Not that she is now, but—
“Rien teach you that one?”
“Dunno. Can never quite understand what he’s trying to teach me.”
“Ha. Even his darling daughter can’t understand a damn thing he says? Figures. That fake bitch is always speaking in riddles, if he shares anything at all.”
“...Do you mean his smile?” The question lodges itself from Yoshihide’s throat, even though she knows it’s pointless to ask Valencina.
“What’s that, Ticket? The hell are you on about?”
“His smile. You think it’s fake?”
“What kind of stupid question is that? His smile, his suit, his name— a smart question would be to ask if anything about him is real. Can’t stand bitches like him. Makes my skin crawl every time I hear that beeping.”
“Mm.”
“We’re all supposed to pass down our techniques to you, but there’s nothing to learn from him. He has no technique, no form. Every time I think about beating the shit out of him, I imagine his head cracking like pottery, and my fist getting stuck in there.”
Valencina rarely speaks at length to her, especially not about anything that could be considered weakness.
Is this weakness?
Yoshihide imagines herself hollow, the same way Valencina claims Rien is. Would it have saved her from the beatings? Or would Valencina still have hit her, her head shattering like a ceramic doll’s?
Could she have emptied herself as a child? Before the first strike, eyes of glass never knowing the sting of tears.
“Been a while since you wanted to go on a drive with your papa, Buddy!” Matthias howls over the rush of wind in his convertible, Yoshihide’s hair splaying behind them, whipping around like it has a mind of its own, dark as ink awash upon a canvas.
Yoshihide doesn’t bother saying anything in return. She agreed to go on this shopping spree with him knowing it would make him happy, softening him up enough to ask what’s really on her mind.
“Where do you wanna go, Yoshihide? Just say the word, and Papa’ll take you there!”
He guffaws, but his amber eyes peer at her from beneath his sunglasses, expectant. She could give him her usual answer: Anywhere.
Instead she says—
“Heard there’s something going on at Marlin Port.”
And off Matthias goes, zooming down the highway without a care in the world.
It turns out to be a fair.
Multicolored stalls of vendors selling food — most assortments of things that should never be fried — and booths featuring various games line the port.
They play.
They win.
Yoshihide snipes a huge teddy-bear where Matthias fails, her aim better than his after stumbling her way around the Thumb’s bayonets, the flow of Valencina’s violent ‘corrections’ stemming as her shooting improved.
She did not and does not enjoy the feeling of shooting. Feels impersonal, lacking an artistic touch. Still, she’s good at it, able to sense the travel time implicitly from pulling the trigger to the bullet finding its mark.
She hands it to Matthias.
“Oi, Buddy, let your papa have some dignity, yeah? It’s embarrassing having my little girl have to win something all on her own. Next time I’ll—” His fingers run along the edge of his Book of Vengeance, playing with the pages idly, a restless tic.
“Don’t think losing counts as a grudge.”
“Oh, you know, the special clauses for the House of Spiders. There must be something in here that I can use—”
“Forget it. We got more prizes than we can carry anyway. Let’s just head back.”
“You sure? You haven’t even tasted their famous ice cream yet!”
“Fine. You can get me some ice cream, just… no more games, okay?”
She looks at their pile of tacky prizes, each one failing to stir any emotion inside her heart. Cheap, disposable, forgettable. Trophies for her father to display in his room, a glorified toy warehouse.
At least these toys are already unboxed. At least they won’t sit upon his shelves, unopened, perfectly pristine for all time.
At least they can breathe.
They get their ice cream.
They lug their haul back to the car.
Some prizes get lost along the way.
Yoshihide says nothing and Matthias doesn’t notice.
The ice cream is fine, she supposes.
Finally, she asks the question she’s been rolling around in her mind the whole time—
“Do you think something like this would make Father happy?”
“Huh? You talking about Rien?”
Matthias pauses starting the car to seat his sunglasses atop his head and look at Yoshihide directly. She takes a bite of her ice cream, so big she can feel some of it drip down her lips.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, Buddy,” her Nursefather says, suddenly serious, slinging one arm around her shoulders while swiping a thumb across her lip to clean her mess. “No man wants to hear a girl talk about another guy while they’re out.”
His thumb lingers, warming the cool spot on her lips.
The ice cream feels too sticky in her mouth. Nauseatingly thick. Too thick to swallow.
She forces it down.
“It’s not like I’m talking about a boyfriend. I’m talking about another Nursefather.” She turns her head to the side, Matthias’s sticky thumb dragging across her skin until he removes it. She pretends not to see him lick up the remains.
“So? Rien’s still a man. Heard he still reads you picture books. Does he put you on his lap when he reads to you? Do you really think he treats you like that because he still sees you as a tot? He has eyes, Yoshihide. He knows what he’s doing.”
Yoshihide reaches up to Matthias and pulls down his sunglasses. She can’t stand his eye color, nearly the same shade as Rien’s.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Matthias sighs, running a hand through his white hair, tousling the blunt edges.
“No, Buddy. I don’t think anything can make that man happy.”
Something hangs in the air between them.
An unsaid understanding.
An exception.
Rien is a man.
Yoshihide’s stomach flips, the ice cream making her insides churn.
“And now, Yoshihide, what would you say the finishing touch should be on my newest tour de force?”
Yoshihide blinks down to where the corpus lays beneath both herself and her Nursefather, what used to be a man sitting with his skin flayed, bones bent and twisted as if they were the springy, malleable branches of a tree, Callisto’s skill at manipulating the human body second to none. Unlike her Nursefather’s usual works, he has kept the face intact, his victim’s expressions still discernible, not yet turned into a mass of pulpy gore.
The corpus whimpers.
Yoshihide looks down.
“You. How should you be finished?”
“Yoshihide, you should know better by now than to converse with the material—”
“Pl-Please, I—”
“You aren’t going to live. So how do you want to die?”
It is not silence that descends upon Callisto’s gallery, but the pathetic whimpering of the half-dead body before her.
“I told you, Yoshihide. There is no point to conversing overmuch with the material. They offer no meaningful insight, and their suggestion always amounts to self-preservation, nothing more than begging,” Callisto chides her, but Yoshihide’s eyes are still locked upon the soon-to-be art piece.
“Speak. This is your last chance.”
The whimpering turns to sobbing.
Then—
“Happy,” he manages to whisper out.
Yoshihide ponders this. Yoshihide extends this man’s suffering by pausing.
“You aren’t here,” she finally says. “You’re somewhere else, far away. Your body is not a body. It is emptiness. You do not exist here—”
In three slices, so fast they’re near simultaneous, she cuts into the flesh of his face, drawing a crude smile onto his lips, and finishing by breaking his neck.
“This is… rather juvenile, Yoshihide. I’m disappointed in your work today. First, conversing with the specimen, and then vandalising my work with a crude slice in— a smile? Were he still alive, I would be able to fix this mistake, but working upon the material post-mortem goes against every ideal of Corporism.”
She shrugs. “Wanted to try something new today.”
“Even so, you must know a smile is the most childish expression of joy there is. It may be shorthand for happiness, but such an expression does not convey what, exactly, brings joy to the subject. It is a mask, an easy answer, to tell the audience what they must feel, rather than being truly understood. In short, it is a shallow imitation of a feeling.”
Yoshihide is not here. Her body is not a body. She floats away under the chastising of her Nursefather, her self dissipating like the plumes of smoke from her cig.
This is the way she survives the House of Spiders. The hurt. The lectures. The tedium.
“Can you smile?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Can you smile with that prosthetic body?”
Callisto does not answer. Yoshihide does not push. They both know the answer.
“I intended to call it: Wuji. Throw it out or whatever if you don’t like it. I don’t care.”
“Ah,” Callisto gasps, in sudden realization, “Yes, yes, I see it now— The juvenile symbol of a smile is meant to draw the eye while the bones curve and bow in almost-perfect circles, the gap in them meant as an expanse into the world, the limitlessness of the universe. Yet, wuji can also mean emptiness, the abandonment of both yin and yang, and so the vacuity of the smile is meant to represent the hollowness of being, the emptiness of such platitudes. Oh, Yoshihide, pray forgive your teacher. Your eye for aesthetics is as impeccable as ever.”
Her Nursefather can think whatever he wants.
She had only meant nothing at all.
Silence.
Yoshihide sits seiza style on her woven red cushion in her own room. She can vaguely hear the shifting of the Dihui Star’s heavy shiromuku as she wanders her own Corridor, the rice paper that cover the sliding doors doing little to muffle noise.
Restless feet that yearn for the outside world. It’s a wonder her footsteps haven’t left an indented path on the tatami floors with how many times she’s paced, a wild animal caged.
The rustling of fabric grows ever fainter as does the opening and shutting of sliding doors. Yoshihide puffs on her cigarette, red eyes watching the plumes of smoke rise, circling among the slats on the ceiling. She can hardly hear her Nursefather anymore.
It’s too late to put out her cigarette now that the fresh smell of burning tobacco has permeated the room, sinking into the tatami, her cushion, the rice paper, the walls.
The door in front of her slides open with no warning, the rustling of heavy cloth no longer background noise, and Yoshihide already stands with a light.
Her mother takes a long drag off her newly lit cig like she was drowning before this, like she can only truly breathe if she’s inhaling smoke.
Her veil still hangs low over her face, even as they smoke together.
Yoshihide can guess, can imagine what lies under that veil. A face just like hers, blunt black bangs and sharp red eyes, sharper and meaner than anything Yoshihide could imitate, as if time has ground its whetstone against her gaze.
Creases in her face, worry-lines and crows-feet. Did her mother have scars?
Yoshihide idly touches the spot on her face where Valencina had once nicked her during training. How Rien had given her a bandage, had instructed her on how to keep the wound moist with K-Corp medicinal oils so that it wouldn’t scar. So that the canvas of her face would remain blank and beautiful.
She wonders if her mother ever had anyone show her such care.
She can't imagine it.
When she tries to imagine her mother young and free, the image turns into a self-portrait, the backdrop always the Corridors of the House of Spiders.
Past, present, and future.
No matter what thread she follows, it always leads back to this place.
Her mother does not smile. Misery seeps, like the smell of cigarettes, into the fabric of her being, unable to be washed away.
Therefore, Yoshihide is not allowed to smile. Misery did not yet cling to her as it did to her mother, but she is reminded day in and day out that she knows nothing of misery.
She is not allowed misery, she is not allowed happiness.
What is she allowed?
What does her body feel?
She reminds herself: Her body is not a body. She wants to float away like her cigarette smoke, but something about being in the presence of her own flesh and blood makes it difficult, her body weighed down, heavy, formlessness given form.
A butterfly who cannot flutter, trapped in a spider’s web.
“You look miserable. Good.” Her mother finally speaks, accompanied by a rasping chuckle.
“Only because you’re here,” Yoshihide fires back, though there’s no bite behind her words.
“The feeling is mutual.”
Her mother takes a seat across from her anyway. She would feel the same anywhere in this house, so it only makes sense she would drag Yoshihide into its depths with her.
Cigarette smoke makes the room hazy and indistinct, like a dream.
There’s no point to asking her mother about happiness. There’s no point to asking her mother about anything.
“Are any of you happy with this situation?”
She expects her mother to laugh, for words sharp as blades to rain down upon her, but instead her mother leans over and ever so gently puts her cigarette out on the back of Yoshihide’s hand.
The pain feels like nothing.
Rien told her the pain of being burned was a hundred times the pain of being stabbed, but this feels like the prick of a sewing needle. Infinitesimally insignificant in the canvas of her life.
“They’re happy,” she spits so venomously Yoshihide’s blood feels like it thickens in her veins. “They get a precious, perfect little girl. Even Valencina, that dog, has her golden ticket. How could they not be happy?”
The Dihui Star does not debase her like she is usually wont to do.
The words spat with sickening sweetness make Yoshihide want to vomit.
“You’re late for storytime, sweetheart.”
Yoshihide can’t see the exact expression Rien wears upon his face, but she knows, implicitly, that he is smiling.
Warm, gentle.
This is how she imagines it from beneath the veil she has stolen.
“How did you know it was me?” she asks, her mouth dry, giving her voice the same low rasp the Dihui Star’s carries.
She made sure to put the many layers of kimono on perfectly. Made sure the obi was tied just so. Practiced walking, tabi tracing the same steps her mother paced every day until she was sure she could carry the weight. Even left her odachi behind so that the difference in scabbards wouldn’t give her disguise away.
If she and her mother are so alike as the woman claims—
If he cannot see her face nor her flesh, covered as she is from head to toe—
If even their scent is the same, steeped in the fragrance of cigarette smoke—
Then how did he know?
“You’re underestimating a father’s intuition, sweetie. Of course I would know my own daughter. Now take that silly thing off, and come here. We’re going to read a story about Mister Frog today.”
She doesn’t know—
What he means—
What he wants her to take off.
Her face burns hot, and she thinks this is what Rien must’ve meant when he said that burning is more painful than stabbing. The guilt. The shame.
She disobeys her father and takes off nothing. Not her veil. Not her gloves. She cannot face him, cannot see his smile, cannot see what those piercing eyes might hold. Cannot know if emptiness is the same as hunger.
She does not take the seat offered to her, the seat beside him.
Instead, she sits directly in his waiting lap.
One of his arms comes to wrap around her waist, keeping her secure against him, just as he always did when she was a child.
She is not a child.
She is a woman.
His other hand holds his picture book in front of them, watercolor illustrations of a frog in a well greeting her.
“Once upon a time…” Rien begins, his even voice soft as velvet, right against her head, her mother’s wataboshi doing nothing to stop her from imagining how his breath might feel against the shell of her ear.
She can’t focus on the story and shifts anxiously in Rien’s lap.
“Sweetheart,” his voice, ever light, ever gentle, lowers in warning. “You can continue to do what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
This is the way Rien warns of imminent disaster. This is how he warned her of Saru’s eventual demise. This is how he warned her as a child, when she would wiggle restlessly in his lap, that she would fall.
She knows she will not fall. She knows that is not what he is warning her of.
She redoubles her efforts, hips grinding in his lap no more than the inexperienced wriggling of a child, frustrating her.
Yoshihide has been taught many things, by many different tutors. The art of seduction is not one of them. All she was taught—
All she was ever meant to be—
Is a weapon.
Not a girl. Not a daughter. Not a woman.
But Rien holds her tight against his body as all three.
He turns her head, kissing her through her veil, lips caressing hers through the opaque fabric until he deepens it, Yoshihide feeling the way his tongue dampens the fabric as it slides against her bottom lip.
“Dad—” she gasps against his needy mouth as she feels it at last, even through the many layers of her kimono and his slacks, the telltale hardness of his arousal. “Are you happy?”
“I’m very happy, sweetheart. You’re making your dad so, so happy.”
His voice is the same, even as it always is. She can’t see his expression through her veil. She does not want to.
He tries to touch her in turn, but the folds of the Dihui Star’s silken robes are not so easily parted once fastened by her obi. Still he rubs incessantly at her even through those many layers, the friction subtle, but there, enough to tease, enough to make her want.
It’s not enough. She should’ve done as she was told, should’ve been obedient, should’ve been fearless, should’ve listened—
Because in the end, her father knows best.
When Yoshihide wakes from her dream, her thighs are sticky with her slick, unable to remember the ghost of her father’s touch.
She doesn’t do anything about it. Cleans herself up in the bathroom and no more.
The ache of need grows dull as the ache of an old bruise and she thinks it shouldn’t hurt if she doesn’t touch it.
What she does remember is—
Rien said he was happy.
Says she made him happy.
An answer no different than his usual fare.
Yoshihide thinks—
She wants to see her father frown.