Brass Ring Interlude 4: When The Cherry Blossom Finds The Wind

Onna-Bugeisha exited a simple tunnel and entered her basement. She was fully armored, but her paired katana were sheathed. While she hated sneaking into her home, she and Kaneda had decided it was necessary if she were to remain with CAPES, providing her with a haven none of her enemies would know of. She smiled as she remembered him pulling out a shovel to help dig the tunnel even as the Steel Amazon had appeared to help her dig it. She had had to broker a compromise, suggesting that if he could make them tea with a light snack that would be sufficient for his share of the project. He had acquiesced, and the two women finished the tunnel, including supports, within a couple of hours. The strawberry teacakes he served that day were still her favorite. He sat back and let the two women enjoy being who they were while he cheered them on.

She learned from him that sometimes the best person on the team is the one who just lets the others do what they do.

Still, she felt she had to apologize for doing the hard labor when, by tradition, he should have done it. Her father had always said that men should do the hard labor, that even she, with her gifts of strength and endurance, should never have to lift a finger. She even felt guilty for joy that the labor brought her as she dug a tunnel, fitted supports, even disposed of the dirt. Due to her father's constant comments, she felt that she had overstepped some bound, but he stopped her with a shrug: He could hardly expect the most powerful woman on the planet to not use that power. She smiled at him. She soon loved to use her powers, to test them in fights with other warriors, to help build skyscrapers, to throw spaceships that she struggled beneath.

Thanks to the love of her husband, she finally learned to love herself.

A smile still upon her lips, she crept to his room. She mentally flashed through all that they had done over the next few decades, with him eventually succumbing to old age. She knew it would have eventually happened, but had not been aware of how painful it would be. While it was expected given her tribe's immortality and him being a mortal, it hurt nonetheless. He lay in a bed hooked up to equipment, a constant reminder of the frailty of human flesh. She teared up just thinking of what he was going through, always debating if the struggle to continue merely living was worth it.

His final lesson to her was that life, however brief, was worth fighting for.

A crash interrupted her trip down memory lane. She was almost thankful for the mercy of the interruption but realized that the crash had happened just inside Kaneda's room. She ran, becoming a literal blur as she unsheathed each katana. She was at the door to his room in mere heartbeats and saw the door open. She slowed just enough to react to anything that she might encounter, and her caution was met with a clawed fist: Shappa of The Qualmi, a woman from a tribe of werelynxes, was over the corpse of her husband, covered in blood, and little else. The lycanthrope smiled.

She saw the still form of her husband, crimson staining the sheet. She stiffened, her tear-stained face hardening into a glare. The target of that glare was smiling, even winked at her. She rushed forward. Her blade pierced the lycanthrope's heart, instantly killing the lycanthrope.

Her biggest secret had been given to her biggest enemy by Telemachus. Shappa had been the balance should she have ever crossed over to the other side. She took a breath. She saw the mercy inside the pragmatism of the maneuver; she could now mourn the death of her husband and thus continue, as she should have done a long time ago. She felt betrayal but forgave the dead psychic for what he had done. She breathed again.

She had learned that there was a season to everything.

Two blades fell to the ground as she fell to her knees at the side of her husband, the sounds of her sobbing filling the house. The most powerful woman on the planet was dealing with the passing of what mattered the most to her. She would mourn the death of her husband for months, and then return to her tribe for a while. Possibly decades. She had no idea what that meant, but knew that her father would welcome her with open arms, and then help her heal. She needed a place where she could mourn her loss, where she could let the emotions playing through her head work themselves out. She needed a sanctuary so her heart could heal.

She had learned she was human.

[The next chapter is here.]