Your Lord And Savior Is Here.

Muchisute had been a practiced archer. He was, still, an archer, but his abilities were only stage worthy now. 

Sometimes he would remember the cold nights in the mountains where his father and mother, faces swept into the melt of time, would command him to stalk the icy woodlands: feet to ground and hands to bow. Where he wouldn’t be allowed back until he brought back meat and skins.

He had had siblings back then, when he was someone’s son. And he knew that some of them died on that mountain. 

But he, Muchisute, didn’t die there. And later when he was a soldier he didn’t die. And later, after the Mukden incident, he didn’t die. 

A bow had been traded for a gun when he wanted to get away from the mountain, his parents, his siblings. And Japan needed soldiers after the dredge of World War 1. The Mukden incident, the False Flag, was the pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria- of which he was looking forward to. 

But Muchisute did not get to feed that bloodthirst in him. He only got an explosion; bright and blazing and terrific- waking up later to find his hands and arms had been blown off. 

Fourteen years old and armless. 

And then the infection set into the skin, the open burn lesions festering. And he had been swamped with a fever so high he had forgotten who he was. The face of his father and mother degrading into the smelt of thoughts. The path back home got lost in a river of magma. 

He had been told, simply, to die. Left to die. Uneducated and a gimp- the nurses had spared him only bindings for his leaking flesh while he relearned how to be a person.

He would never be a person. 

Muchisute left that dream long long ago. Not when he incurred more bruises and beating when he begged for food. Not when the seat of his pants held blood when he couldn’t fight off men and boys even smaller than he. Then, as sugar was to pastry, he contracted leprosy. 

He’d been mean before. He’d been cruel before. Any kindness leaked out of the stumps left behind. Any softness was eaten away by his illness. 

And now, he was also ‘The Mummy Man’. The gun had been traded back for a bow. The title of ‘abused’ had become ‘abuser’. 

So when he woke up remembering the long days of learning how to eat sitting up like a man instead of hunched like a dog, of walking with a limp, of the blood and the sickness and the-

He stood above Midori. It was winter still and would be for some weeks and so she sat there shaking and chattering in her sleep. The girlish curve of her cheek and the caress of her bobbed hair curled to the underside of her jaw. A place he wished to bite. 

She was the same age that he had been when he had descended the mountain. He wondered, idly, if she would even survive the two years before her arms were blown off. 

He could have been cruel in these moments. He could have kicked her so hard that she would have only woken up long enough to choke on her seizing diaphragm before falling into unconsciousness. He could have stepped on her face. He could have bitten off her clothing and chased her, dead scared, into the deeper cold outside the tent. 

Meal time was always interesting. 

Hunger had a way of warping a person. Of changing them, killing the conscious mind and allowing the most basic self to emerge. To blend into the skin and bite through the heated restraints. When the skin came loose and dogs bit at the only scraps they could find.

This was the third night that Midori had gone without. 

And all she had the decency to look like was tired and sad. Her face flickering between the heavy curtain as a winter breeze swayed the material back and forth. She was staring at the empty pan, a drying noodle stuck to the edge like a worm drying in the open air. No teeth, no gum, no snarl of wild instinct. Just…disillusioned blankness. 

A month ago, she had been faced with the same situation and she had cheated her way into a meal. He’d held some sick version of disgusted pride at that, that she would lower herself and use cheap tactics that both humiliated her and delivered her what she wanted. A flash, a vision, that she could someday be like them. 

But now? No. That Midori wasn’t here. Instead, what stood in the cold wind outside the view of everyone else was something so very foreign, so very beyond him that he couldn’t do anything but hate it. A phantom, haunting the circus. 

Muchisute lifted the chopsticks to his mouth, the head of his femur grinding in the socket of his hip as he did so. He had not been born flexible, but had adapted to stay alive. You had to adapt and adapt and adapt.

So why couldn’t she? Why couldn’t she match her expression with the hungry craze that glossed over Kanabun’s or the manipulative sexual malaise that crawled between the cracks of Benistu’s. Get over the ache, the pain of muscles conforming to a new pose. 

None of them here were human. And she! She was not human either. That had all changed that her first night here when they took turns to degrade, rape, and destroy her. When they proved to her that she was them now and there was nothing that the world could do about it. 

But as blood spread like rivers from her destroyed sex, she stared blankly at the wall. And he, who had been in a war that had taken his arms at her age, could see that they had failed in stripping her true innocence. That bitch. 

Blinking, the image of Midori’s still, stiff body and bloody thighs was replaced with an empty image. No girl, no yellow and red dress in the midst of fat, floating snowflakes. 

“Where’d she go?” Muchisute spoke before he could stop himself. His tone was grating, angry. His curiosity hidden beneath a veneer of hatred that had the pleasant effect of sounding like crushed gravel between his clenched teeth. 

“Who?” Akaza grunted next to him, his teeth clacking as the mismatched edges cut through the oily bits of meat in his bowl. The strongman didn’t even look up and the tone was disinterested. “The girl?” 

“...tch.” Kanabun made a noise before snickering. “Want her cute cotton panties to chew on instead? You’ve hardly touched your dinner.”

There was that familiar hunger in the boy-girl’s eye as well. The hunger reflected in pitless black eyes and expressed in a mouth of chipped teeth. Kanabun wasn’t far off, a different hunger had coiled beneath the surface and Muchisute had made it no mystery that he liked the curveless body of Midori. The taste of salty tears on savory cheeks.

He was busy and it was out of the corner of an eye, just under the loose tail of his bandages. Between the frayed edges of the world, she stood small yet firm; a colorful imprint on the bleak winter dead landscape. Smog, mist, and snow hung in the air like a dead thing, but it haloed around her like a moth might halo around light.

She raised her hand and waved, a train passing by. The rolling timber of the wheels and the harsh metal clank receding into the snowy mist in the distance. Like the heart beat of some vile, haunted beast. 

The hand fell, Midori’s fingers smooched with red from the cold air and a cut on one knuckle where a rooster had snipped the skin during her geek performance the previous night. She’d vomited afterwards, her moans souring the air backstage. 

Weak. Pitiful. 

Benitsu had beaten her for that one; stripped her foot bindings away and beat the soles of Midori’s feet until they bled. The girl had squirmed and screamed, briefly, in the beginning before falling silent and still. Like a bleak ghost, greying out and turning into herself in a way that no amount of bullying could draw her back. 

Today, however, she was back. And Muchisute felt an oily sense of satisfaction that she would have to walk on those beaten feet until the circus reached the next stop. 

“...Midori.” 

He watched as the base of her spine stiffened first, drawing up from her pelvis to the tender curve of her neck. Ridged as she turned to look at him with prey-like brown eyes. 

Like a fawn. She hadn’t known he’d been watching.

There was vividity in those eyes, at this moment. A sheer snapshot where he could see the innocent humanity glitter in pools of sadness, endless and like the ocean at night. There was no reason for them to be so dewey, so wet and mournful-

“Get back to work.” Muchisute aimed a kick at her head, missed, and instead his barefoot clipped her shoulder.