#sable shepherd

———

“Is this some kind of joke?” Sable says by way of greeting the moment the call connects.

“Pleasure to hear from you as always, Shepherd.” Ryu’s voice on the phone sounds the same as ever, calm and dryly amused, as if he’s the only one who knows the punchline. “I take it the kid showed up on time?”

With that remark, Sable no longer lives in a world where this was all some unfortunate misunderstanding. He was clinging to the possibility, as unlikely as it was, that the little boy in the front room had wandered through the wrong door in search of the parent he wandered away from at the grocer or laundromat—that a frantic older turtle would swoop through any second now and snatch him up, scolding him and apologizing to Sable for the inconvenience in the same breath—that Sable would be able to gruffly wave the little family away and go back to bracing himself for the person Ryu was actually sending.

It feels like he’s standing underwater and the pressure is getting to his head, making him say something he ordinarily wouldn’t dare say.

“The kid is the damn problem,” Sable bites back, feeling insane. “He’s practically two feet tall, and walked in here armed with a weapon bigger than he is. Where the hell are his parents?”

“Doesn’t have any, far as I can tell. You know, the orphanage he ran away from didn’t even report him missing?” Ryu chuckles, a rich, oily sound, as if it was funny, as if what he was really saying was could it be any more perfect?

Sable’s heartbeat thunders in his ears, the pressure building, and he realizes he has never in his life been angrier than he is right now. His parents are both long-gone, distant relatives scattered to the winds, and he’s never once considered starting a family of his own, but even someone as unqualified as Sable knows that a child deserves more than this. Someone to worry about where they go, to make sure they come in from the cold and eat well, a soft place to land.

Otherwise kids slip through the cracks and get snatched up by people like Ryu.

“I hope you don’t think that just because you run a restaurant you can tell me how to run my business,” Ryu goes on in a deceptively pleasant tone. “You’re a smarter spirit than that.”

Unfortunately for both his own conscience and the sake of the child in the front room, Sable is a smarter spirit than that.

“Just curious,” he grits out.

“No harm done,” Ryu replies magnanimously. “Be less curious next time.”

Sable would like to slam the handset of the corded landline back into the reciever hard enough to break them both, but a lifetime of controlling his strength and marshalling his temper kicks in like clockwork. He doesn’t need to deal with a broken phone on top of everything else. And he doesn’t want to scare the kid.

When he returns to the dining room, his new tenant is standing right where he left him, head down and shoulders up, bright brown eyes alert and watchful. He’s already looking at Sable the second he comes back through the door, likely following the sound of his footsteps.

Sable realizes, abruptly, that he doesn’t know anything about turtle yokai. He’s probably only met one other before in his life, a wizened old tortoise who had worked at a museum Sable’s middle school had visited on a field trip and was the type of person it was hard to imagine as anything younger than a hundred years old. Sable wouldn’t have guessed their senses were heightened to any particular degree, hearing keen enough to follow the movements of someone in anothe room.

He wonders, with a pit in his stomach, how much of that phone conversation the kid had heard. Judging from the wariness on his little spotted face that hadn’t been there before Sable took the call, he likely heard most of it.

They’re off to a great start.

“Sorry about that,” he says. His voice is gruff, a low rumble that he doesn’t normally make any effort to soften, but he watches the way the lines of the kid’s body go taut with nerves and wants to kick himself for it. “My name’s Sable. You?”

“Clem,” the turtle replies politely, even giving a short bow.

Sable had been half-expecting the kid to try to act like a pint-sized thug, given the crowd that had absorbed him and the fact that he had seemingly been fending for himself on the city streets for gods knew how long. The manners take him by surprise.

“And you’re how old?” he can’t help but pry.

“Thirteen,” Clem replies. Sable doesn’t believe that for a goddamn second, even if the kid does have one hell of a poker face.

Still, thirteen is bad enough. Clem should be in school, where the biggest thing he has to worry about is remembering to do his homework. He should be somebody’s child. Sable should be a better person, a braver one, and tell Ryu to his face that he’s evil for this.

But what good would it do? The cops are crooked, and the Ryu-gumi owns every inch of this town, and Sable is not a better person.

The conversation is stilted and uncomfortable on both ends—because Sable has no clue how to handle children in general but especially tragically self-sufficient ones, and Clem doesn’t trust Sable as far as he can throw him—but Clem doesn’t forget his manners and Sable does his best to gentle his growl and they manage to make it upstairs to the studio apartment in one piece.

Somehow the apartment looks even worse now that Sable knows it’s meant to house the orphan trailing up the stairs obediently behind him. He opens the door and flicks the light switch, and the bulb overhead flickers valiantly a couple times before it manages to stay on and the sparseness of the room is laid bare.

He’s braced for any number of complaints from the kid, or at the very least incredulousness—if you told Sable he had to pay his hard-earned cash for a bare-minimum place like this over top of a rowdy bar, he’d be incredulous, too. There isn’t even a bedframe for the mattress and box springs to sit on.

But Clem takes a few careful steps forward, surveying the room with that gravity that makes him look like he’s thirteen going on fifty. He doesn’t say anything for what feels like an hour, but is probably closer to a minute. Sable can see his hands, down at his sides, clenching in the fabric of his pants as if he needs the reminder to stay still.

To fill the silence, Sable explains about the hot plate and mini fridge, the half-bath with a standing shower in the back, the door with a lock.

“The key will open your apartment, and the restaurant side door, so don’t lose it,” Sable says gruffly, passing it over.

It’s hanging on a braided cord that turns out to be just big enough for a scrawny turtle yokai to slip over his head, which is what Clem does with it immediately. He tucks the key out of sight under his scarf, but he doesn’t let go of it right away, clinging to it with a hand Sable would guess is bunched into a fist.

“Thank you, Mr. Shepherd,” Clem says, as if all of this has been a kindness, and not the bare minimum. Remembering his manners. Grateful to this latest in a line of adults that have all failed him completely.

Sable can’t look him in the eye, opting to turn around and head back down the stairs.

“I got a space heater in storage somewhere,” he says, taking the coward’s way out, hating himself more with every step. “I’ll be back with it in a few.”

It takes five minutes to find the space heater, and an additional fifteen to muster the willpower to face the kid again. When Sable finally hauls the heater up to the second floor, he finds that Clem has bravely ventured far enough to sit on the edge of the bed with his measly bag on the floor at his feet. He’s testing the give of the old mattress, running gloved hands over the worn-soft quilt that could use a good dusting, his spotted face filled with tentative, barely-daring-to-believe-it hope.

Where did he come from that a room like this could look like a safe haven?

Sable wants to ask, but he hasn’t earned the right. And it wouldn’t make a difference. This is where they are now.

———

Clem turns out to be the best tenant a reluctant landlord could hope for.

By which Sable means he usually doesn’t see or hear any evidence that he even has a tenant unless the kid chooses to be seen or heard. Once or twice, he’s heard the side door open well after Tenten has closed for the evening, when there’s no noise to drown out the solid thunk of the heavy lock turning, and then small footsteps up the creaky stairs.

He tries to leave well enough alone. Ryu wouldn’t be pleased to find out Sable stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. And Clem hasn’t asked for help—which isn’t surprising. He’s all of three apples tall and renting an apartment on his own. If he’d ever asked for help before now, he must have been sorely disappointed. He’s a child who is learning his own lessons about how the world works—just grit your teeth and deal with it because no one is coming to save you.

Sable isn’t coming to save him.

But every so often he lets himself upstairs when the kid is gone and takes measure of things. He quietly stocks the closet-turned-pantry with canned goods and shelf-stable items like noodles and rice, keeps milk and eggs in the fridge, leaves a saucepan and a can-opener on the counter.

Clem never mentions it. As far as he knows, Sable’s quiet oversight is a regular part of room and board.

Sometimes he lingers between the side door and the stairway when he gets home—when he gets back—from whatever shit-show Ryu is likely putting him through, standing there on the fringes of the kitchen. Sable can feel Clem’s eagle eyes watching him as if there is something he would very much like to say. But he never does.

And then exactly one month later, Clem cautiously approaches the counter with squared shoulders, every step as dogged as if there was no other way to get to where he needed to be but to walk through a tiger’s den while the tiger was in it.

He’s holding something in both hands, clutched tight against his plastron, and Sable feels the first stirrings of dread even before Clem opens his mouth and says, “Ryu told me to pay you rent on the first day of the month.”

Sable is glad he isn’t actively holding any dishware. As it is, the cleaning rag doesn’t make a sound when he drops it on the counter.

“What,” he says at length.

Clem’s whole body seems to shrink an inch, shoulders curling up toward his ears, arms pressing tighter to his front, as if the word was a slap. But he’s made of sterner stuff than any adult yokai Sable knows, because he doesn’t back down.

“I have it,” Clem says, and holds what turns out to be a squashed wad of cash and coins collected between his gloved hands. “I counted,” he adds, when all Sable does is stand there.

“Ryu told you to pay me rent?” Sable grits out. He can hear the enraged rumble enter his voice and can’t do anything about it.

“He said—you have to pay rent to stay somewhere,” Clem explains. His voice is losing its steely resolve. He looks like he expects the world to crumble out from beneath him at any moment. He wants to keep that little room above the bar, he wants to do whatever it will take to keep it, doesn’t want to be without a safe place to return to at the end of the day. He jumps through every hoop Ryu puts in front of him. What else is he supposed to do?

It occurs to Sable that the kindest thing he could possibly do in this moment is just take the money. But he can’t bring himself to take it.

“Fine, just,” he says, and waves helplessly toward the counter, “put it there.”

Clem perks up and hustles forward to do as he’s told. He has to clamber inelegantly up onto one of the barstools without his hands in play, and kneels there on the seat so he can reach the counter, and carefully piles his tiny, crumpled wealth in front of Sable.

Then he starts sorting bills and counting coins, and the number just keeps going higher. His little spotted face is furrowed with concentration, serious about the task at hand. It reminds Sable of watching kids count out their allowance to buy a treat in the marketplace.

The outcome of gods know how many hours of his little life spent working instead of playing. And it’s going right back to line Ryu’s pockets in the long run anyway.

Finally, he stops. There is laughably little left in the pile for Clem to keep.

Sable feels like he’s aged about a hundred years in the past two minutes. He says, “Look, kid. Whatever Ryu told you—” He stops. Takes a breath in and lets it out. Clem will do whatever Ryu tells him, and so will Sable, and pretending otherwise is a waste of eveyone’s time. He starts again, “Don’t carry your money around like that. And don’t count it out in the open, either. This place is empty now, but what if someone had been skulking around and saw that little fortune of yours up for grabs?”

Turning away from the bar, he steps into the tiny office in the back and rummages until he comes up with a box of envelopes. He sets them on the counter and pushes them over to the turtle, then sweeps his rent payment into the till without bothering to count it, the strangest transaction of his entire life.

Clem picks up the box of envelopes gingerly. His face asks the question his mouth won’t.

“Keep your money safe,” Sable says. “Don’t ever wander around with it like that again. Put your rent payment in an envelope and leave it in my office back there.” He gestures. Clem follows his hand with round eyes. “If I’m not here, then it can wait ‘til I am. Got it?”

Clem blinks once, looks down at the box of envelopes he’s holding, then nods.

“Got it,” he says. He’s thirteen, learning how the world works.

Sable needs a drink.

———

The years roll on. The arrangement, which seemed so precarious and absurd at first, settles into normalcy.

By the time Clem was fourteen, he was brave enough to approach Sable when he got home in the evening. Sometimes he would thank him for the groceries Sable dropped off earlier in the week, sometimes he would mention a sale at the supermarket where the restaurant got its produce, sometimes he would just wring his hands together and ask if there was anything downstairs he could help with.

The first time, Sable turned him down shortly. He wasn’t not going to add to the work this kid already had on his plate, and he’d been running Tenten solo for years. Only then he saw Clem’s expression, not as hard to read as Sable had once thought it was, turn crestfallen, and he took himself upstairs to a quiet, empty room.

The next time he mustered the courage to ask, Sable pointed him at the sink of dirty dishes, and said if he felt like helping with a few chores, Sable would let him pick something off the menu to eat. And Clem hurried behind the bar like the dishes would grow legs and run away from him if he wasn’t fast enough. And then he swept, and then he sorted tickets, and all the while he asborbed the noise and conversation and Sable’s gruff instructions like he was a sun-starved plant reaching desperately toward a brand-new source of light.

By the time Clem was fifteen, he showed Sable a side of him that he’d never seen before, the one that was nurtured, for better or worse, by the gang he’d been running with for years at that point.

A group of thugs came into the bar with nothing on their minds but causing trouble, each of them on the younger side of their mid-twenties, and clearly new to the area if they didn’t realize that messing with the local mob’s favorite restaurant was a certain death sentence. They were messing around, breaking glasses and picking fights with the other patrons, and Sable was reaching for the jitte he kept under the counter when he heard a mechanical thwack, and one of the troublemakers stumbled back from a table—or, more accurately, from the bolt lodged in the table an inch from where his hand had been.

Clem stood on the stairs with his crossbow raised. He’d grown into it since the first time Sable had seen him with it. He held it like its weight was familiar, and chambered another bolt like he wasn’t shy about using it. He didn’t have to say anything—the threat in his hands was loud enough.

The dining room whistled and cheered for him once the punks had been run out, and Clem, who handled positive reinforcement about as gracefully as a wet cat, disappeared back up the stairs. Sable shook his head, feeling at once fond and disbelieving. It took this long, but it looked like Sable was finally on the receiving end of the Ryu-gumi’s protection after all.

By the time Clem was sixteen, he usually had the restaurant ready to open by the time Sable arrived in the morning, prep work done, till counted, chairs moved off of tables. He was still cautious around yokai who were big and loud, and he still wore a guarded, mean expression as if to stave off anyone who might get the idea he was an easy target, but he smiled when he saw Sable. His shoulders weren’t so tense when he worked behind the bar.

He would never be a talkative character, but comparing him to the boy who first walked through the door three years ago was like comparing night and day. He was growing up into a fine young yokai, and his family—the real deal, wherever they were—would have been proud.

By the time Clem was seventeen, a war was brewing.

It wasn’t anything official, and the council of heads hadn’t issued a statement, but word spread like mold. It was all anyone on the street could talk about. The former head of security who had gone rogue more than a decade ago had reappeared with weapons he had built, mutations that he planned to eradicate humankind with. They were fast, the yokai who had seen them spoke of them in whispers, incredibly strong. They could destroy an army in minutes. They wore armor that looked like turtle shells.

The Hidden City had become a more dangerous place almost overnight. Traders willing to move through the human world became scarce. Prices at the grocers’ went up. Tensions were high, and mounting higher every day. The person to blame for it was using weapons shaped like turtles.

Sable noticed it well before Clem did—the way heads would turn to follow him when he entered a room, eyes pinned to his blue-back, white-spotted shell. Even some of the bar’s long-time patrons, who had watched Clem grow up from their usual tables in the dining room, stopping looking at him with the warmth they used to. Sable felt lower than dirt, giving the kid a jacket and telling him, not in so many words, to cover up his shell, but what else could he do?

He worried every time Clem walked out the door. At some point, it just became second-nature to worry about him—nobody’s child, seventeen going on seventy, strong and stubborn and self-sufficient to a fault, and more often than not the last thing on Sable’s mind before he fell asleep.

And then, on a day like any other, Clem didn’t come home.

———

Ryu’s men come sniffing around for answers, ransacking the restaurant and running out patrons, carving up the smooth polished countertop with a wicked knife clearly meant for more than wood carving.

Sable honestly doesn’t have the first clue where Clem disappeared to, but even if he did, he would have kept his mouth shut. Here in the eleventh hour, when it doesn’t benefit anybody, he managed to find his spine.

He’s proud of Clem for taking the opportunity to run. He approves of the kid for not stopping to tell anyone, even Sable; for the sense he had not to return to this place where he had always been safe, where they would look for him first.

“Just tell us where you think he went,” one of the yokai—the one without the knife—wheedles. “Then we’ll get out of your hair and leave you be.”

“Doesn’t matter where he went and you know it,” Sable finally says with grim satisfaction. “He’s too fast for any of you to catch even without a headstart. By now he’s long gone, and you’re going back to your boss empty-handed. Have a nice life.”

He’s hoping, even as he says it, that it’s true. That Clem is somewhere beyond Ryu’s reach.

That kid who used to count coins on the counter, who learned how to make omelets from watching at Sable’s elbow—that tiny, flinching little thing barely bigger than the bow he taught himself to use, who grew up into the broad-shouldered soldier who could silence rowdy patrons with one stern glance—that kid who still tilted his chin down an inch in deference every time he met Sable’s eyes, who still left his rent money in an envelope on the office desk, who still lingered hopefully before going upstairs for the evening in case there was a job he could do, always starving for company but without half a clue how to ask for it—

Let him make it, Sable prays, without knowing who he’s praying to. Let him make it out.

Ryu lets the destroyed dining room stand as Sable’s punishment. Sable doesn’t know the details of what happened that day Clem decided to run, has been kept uninformed of the goings-on of the Ryu-gumi by design, but from what he’s gleaned, it sounds like it was a very sudden event. It couldn’t have been planned. Sable couldn’t have planned it with Clem. As far as Ryu knows, Sable is a smarter yokai than that.

The bear yokai cleans the wreckage of his life’s work, sweeping up broken glass and righting tables, and thinks that he is probably not a smarter yokai than that.

He thinks if his kid were to appear at the door, with that usual resting frown on his face and something beseaching in his dark brown eyes, Sable would drop everything for him. Ryu would be surprised to find just how quickly Sable would leave everything else behind.

But it doesn’t matter. Clem never steps foot in Tenten again.

Two months later, a group of five Ryu-gumi are clustered around a table in the corner, and wave Sable over for a round of refills.

As he approaches, one of the yokai, a sleek, pale marten that he’d never seen before, says loudly, “Have you guys noticed this big lug leaves the second floor light on every night? How stupid is it to hold out any hope that that ungrateful brat will ever show his face around here again?”

All the air goes out of the room with a hush as the other patrons stop breathing. Sable stops in his tracks, sake bottle heavy in his hand.

The marten enjoys the atmosphere he’s created, leaning into as he turns around to sneer up at him.

“Problem?”

In answer, Sable straightens his posture, standing at full height. The smugness on the yokai’s face falters, so far out of his weight class it’s almost laughable, a rodent squaring up to a bear.

The only thing protecting him in that moment is Sable’s good sense and they both know it. If Sable chose to lift him out of his chair and break his neck, Ryu would make him pay for it later, but revenge is not protection, and this guy would still be dead.