A/N: Uploading from my phone, sorry if the formatting is screwy. This one just kind of... Happened. Thank you all for the reviews, I am getting over a fairly serious illness and they help me SO MUCH. Make sure to let me know what you think about this new one. I'm still on the fence about it.

016. Criminal

They say a girl always falls for a man like her father, but to Fuu her father is a turned back and a thousand footsteps, a faceless ghost that can't even be made solid by the old photographs her mother kept. She knows what he once was: an honorable man, a loyal son, a kind husband, a doting father, a keeper of old traditions. Or that's what she's told by Mother, who is, at best, an unreliable source of information. Her memories are rose tinted and clouded by blind devotion.

Once, and only once, Grandfather spoke of him. "You want to know about your father?" For the first time in Fuu's memory, Grandfather appeared old. He was a big man, tall and broad and fierce, with thick gray hair and heavily calloused hands. His students called him sensei and he always wore old fashioned clothes, like they were hundreds of years in the past and still in Japan. On that day there was a heavy sadness in his eyes, and something Fuu would later come to recognize as guilt.

"Yes," she'd answered in Japanese, because Grandfather rapped her knuckles or the backs of her thighs with a shinai when she dared speak English inside their home. "I don't remember him well."

"Of course you don't. You were so young…" He'd sighed, heavily, as though he was in physical pain or maybe just exhausted. Sitting seiza with a back straighter than a yard stick, it was difficult for Fuu to look at Grandfather and see his pain or tiredness. He was a rock, and she was too young to understand how the water washed him away ever so slowly. "Everything came easily to Kasumi; he was handsome, incredibly intelligent, charming, and a gifted swordsman. He was also easily swayed, cowardly, and never understood what it was to truly work at anything. It's why he left the family… it wasn't easy, anymore."

Grandfather spoke the hard truths others blinded themselves to, a fact Fuu was aware of even as a child. His words carried the weight of honesty, as brutal as they may have some times been. She hardened her heart to her father on day, and vowed that she would never love anyone like the faithless, cowardly man that abandoned his family when times became difficult.

When Grandfather becomes truly old and incredibly frail, they go back to Japan. Fuu thinks she should feel a loss at leaving America, the land of her remembered childhood, but she's always felt more like an untethered balloon than a person with roots. In Kyoto the corners seem to hold memories of a time long gone, and sometimes Fuu scans crowds looking for something… something impossible. A dream she used to have: a tanto, a long road, steel glinting in sunlight, and the scent of the ocean.

She never finds it, which is no shock. Still, it's a habit to keep looking.

Grandfather dies. Jin takes up the school, another man to keep the old traditions alive, to not let their swordstyle be forgotten. He trains businessmen and children and famous actors, is called by big name directors to help chorograph fight scenes. "It's what I must do," he says of his work, but there's a melancholy about him that breaks Fuu's heart. He feels it, too, the pull of somewhere – sometime – else. It was cruel that he was born in this time, this place: Jin is a man of the past, curelessly flung into the modern world where he'll forever be outside looking in.

"You couldn't possibly find a better husband," Mother quietly encourages at night, brushing Fuu's hair out.

Once, when she was just barely a teenager, Fuu thought she loved Jin. They kissed a few times, when Grandfather brought them on trips back to Japan, but it was very wet and terribly boring and eventually he adjusted his glasses and quietly declared, "They're going to be disappointed in us."

"Yeah," Fuu answered, "I guess so."

"There's no man better than Jin." This is a true statement, and one Fuu's not afraid to make. "But he's not for me." Equally true, and one she hopes to eventually convince Mother of.

Representing the family, Fuu gets drug along to Okinawa by Jin. "It's good that we appear together," he keeps telling her, but she doesn't understand why. He was adopted, so what does it matter if she's there or not? Besides, she's a mediocre swordsman at best; probably because she has no real interest in getting all laced up in protective gear and beating people with sticks. Maybe she's a barbarian, but what's the point if she can't really knock her opponent out? Yeah, sure, skills or whatever, but come on – and you know what else she's never understood? Shouting where you're going to hit the guy – really? Wouldn't that be suicidal in a real fight?

"Hey bro, I'm gonna knock you upside the head now, that cool?"

"Yeah man, while you do that I'm gonna whack you in the stomach. Go!"

Men are so dumb. Because really, it was created by men for their man friends, so they could go stab their man not friends in the face and take their stuff. Fuu's got better things to do with her time then learn how to (not really) kill people.

Wandering on the sea shore, pondering the uselessness of her being there, Fuu's distracted gaze passes over a man. It comes back, focus sharpening. He's got chin whiskers, wild hair, crazy eyes, and big blue tattoos. The grin he's wearing makes her think of a tiger: toothy, hungry, and outside the scope of human morality. He's squaring off against some big American guy, one whose buzz cut and bearing suggests military. She can't hear what they're saying, just the tone of their voices as the wind carries the sound down the beach. Feet coming to halt, Fuu wraps her arms around her stomach and simply watches, curious.

The military guy shoves the other one, fingertips on a shoulder. To Fuu it looks like a warning, a sign to back off, but maybe it's a taut. A come and get it move; guys really go in for that sort of thing, she's noticed.

It's like watching a hurricane appear out of nowhere, seeing that guy fight. He explodes into wild action, moving so quickly and randomly that she hasn't got a hope of keeping up. He's punching, he's kicking, he's on his back, he's fucking spinning, and that army guy is getting the shit kicked out of him. The sand beside the dock beings to soak up blood, and Fuu swears she hears the sound of bones being snapped with the crazy one stomps on his victim's chest.

"Hey!" Waving her arms, she breaks into a run. "Hey! Quit it! He's not getting back up, okay? You won, knock it off!"

The gaze that looks her down, up, and back again is leering. She hates guys that look at women like they're blow up dolls, as though they exist only to please men. "The fuck are you, bitch?"

It takes a great force of will not to punch him in the face. "None of your business: that's who, asshole. But you leave this guy alone, now. He's not going to give you any more trouble."

With a roll of his dark eyes, he fluidly shifts his weight, so he's leaning closer. It's obvious that he's trying to intimate her and it sort of works, because he looks like some kind of raw, starving dog. "A bitch like that couldn't give me trouble in the first place, kid. But he's damn sure going to come in and pay off the money he owes – isn't that right, Private?"

The private gurgles his agreement.

Scathing paints Fuu's words and body language, now. "What are you, some kind of mobster?"

"You got a problem with it if I am?"

"None of my business what a loser does with his life."

"That's right because you're so much better than me. Ever had to work for money in your life, princess?" His words are cruel and biting. She's immediately infuriated, mostly because he's seen her for, what, three minutes? Three minutes and he can zero in and tell Fuu a truth she's been avoiding for a long time. (That maybe she's more like her father than she wants to admit, enjoying the easy road and all the gold it's lined with.)

"You don't know me! You know nothing about me!"

"And you know nothing about real life, so get the fuck out of my face."

"You – you – you fucking jerk!" Fuu shrieks at his back as he stomps away, the geta he wears with his baggy shorts clacking strangely on the wooden dock.

Three days later they meet again, on the same beach, and she learns his name – Mugen. Two days after that they're bickering about music when some guy grabs her ass and asks Mugen how much it'd cost to borrow her for a while. She's never seen so much blood come from one person. They have sex at his place, on the floor, and Fuu screams because it's never been so brutal – so good – in her life. A week more and Jin finds out, tracks them down to have this Jin-esque hissy fit all over the dirty little apartment Mugen lives in. He even brings a sword, like what? He's gonna slice Mugen up?

Thing is, Mugen's got a sword, too. A weird old thing that's a little of this, a little of that, and heavy as shit… but it sings when he swings it. They knock down a sliding door and bust out a window, end up fighting in the street and the police get called. Fuu bails them both out.

"You're sleeping with a criminal," Jin tightly hisses, like he's got a bokken shoved up his ass. There's a look on his face like he's stepped in something disgusting.

Meeting his gaze directly, she explains it all in three words: "But he's honest."

A few years later, Fuu meets her father. He's mild, sickly, quiet, and ashamed – and he's nothing at like her fiancé. It only makes her love Mugen more.