Note: Sunny takes place in an alternate universe, in which Japan has never been “Westernized.” Because of this sway of opinion, the country has been divided into two groups: the ones who follow the Emperor in his modern ways, or the ones who cling to the honors and traditions of Japan―the rebels.

Sunny

December 12th, Present Year

I vomited into the snow. My body, bruised and shamelessly fatigued, was taut; my breath was shallow and labored under dry heaves. The cold made my fingers curled and livid, as though they had been turned inside out. The wind flayed the skin from my bones.

Two days ago, I was taken from my home in Okinawa by a group of Hiroshi’s ninjas. They called themselves “Sect Aka” and dressed in clothes common to their kind. Their sudden arrival in our village had spurred our attentions onto my father, the great Taijutsu master Takeuchi Masakazu. These ninja had not wanted him.

My throat constricted, but I fought down the second wave of nausea. Posture slackening, I let my head follow the trunk of the tree into the snow. My body felt good when I let it lie lifeless, still… quiet. When I let it sleep, conclusions came easier to me. Things made sense.

My eyelids flew open as soft fingers glanced my face. It was one of the ninja, the only one left, but my poor vision hid his features. I felt his hands at my back and saw his halo of yellow hair, and I knew he must be one of the ninja from Overseas. I shoved myself out of his grasp.

He never spoke to me. For a ninja, I knew this wasn’t unusual, but I wasn’t used to the ninja’s ways. My father had told me they were pointless. He was a spy for the Emperor. I valued his opinion.

I gripped the tree trunk and pulled myself onto my feet. My fingers, failing to uncurl, scraped against the bark. It was covered in melting sleet.

I took one step―two steps―three, before I felt his grip on my upper arm, tugging me back. I sobbed dryly, projecting a warm puff of air in front of my face. My vision didn’t blur with tears, and I felt unsatisfied. I tried to speak.

“Don’t,” I mumbled in a monotone, afraid of provoking the stranger. Then―“Why me? Why not my father?”

But all I received was a cloudy view of a yellow-haired ninja and a hand at my back, settling my body back into the snow. There was a pause, and then his cool fingers circled my arm, gloved and soft. I grew sick when I heard the flick of metal.

There was pressure, and then the blade sank into my wrist.

…………………

I cried out as the comb, stiff and wiry, bit my neck.

“Umeko-chan, too high!” I laughed and twined my hand around my neck, groping for the hair ornament as my friend held it out of reach. She danced across my bedroom, tossing the object in gleaming arches and catching it with ease.

“She’s aiming to put her eye out,” Hana remarked behind me. “Right before the big day, too.”

Umeko leaped behind me and I stilled myself as she began twisting my hair around her fingers. “I’ll be wearing so much makeup, no one will notice,” she told my cousin. Holding the ornament between her teeth, she grabbed the hairbrush from the bed and raked it through my tangles. “I don’t know why you won’t grow your hair long,” she shot at me. “Men like long hair.”

My mouth curled. “Someone’s nervous,” I teased, taking the brush from my friend after she’d swatted me with it. I felt goose bumps as she began tugging my hair in different directions, plaiting and twisting the wiry rope off my neck. She sank the comb into place.

“I can afford to be nervous,” she declared, airing sophistication. I clambered onto the bed and glanced over my cousin’s shoulder at the magazine she was reading. I caught the words “yuku toshi.” Umeko sidled to the closet, pulling it open to admire her wedding dress once again. Her eyes glanced at us. “Do you guys think the sash…”

We all looked to the door. Footsteps pounded the hallway. Seconds later, my mother was sliding the door open, panic evident on her features. “Rebels are asking about your father.” She pressed one hand over the other, testing to see how far the door could stand ajar. With rapid steps, she crossed to where Umeko stood at the closet and pulled the starch-white dress from the rack. “In here. Quickly!”

My cousin and I half-heartedly scrambled from the bed and ducked beneath the logo-ed plastic. My friend didn’t follow us.

“No… Sorano,” I heard her address my mother. “I’ll stay with you.”

There was a pause, and then my mother snaked her head around the dress one last time. “Stay in here,” she said, her whisper furious, before shutting the closet door with a snap. I strained my ears and heard two sets of feet quickly departing the room. My mother said something to my friend as the bedroom door slid shut, and then there was silence.

Our breath was loud in the dark. I heard Hana shift against some clothes. After a moment, she asked me, “Has this ever happened before?”

“Once,” I replied.

She was silent. I closed my eyes, stretching to hear some voice―some movement. My limbs were growing increasingly jittery.

Suddenly I tensed. “Do you hear that?” I breathed, letting my eyes widen against the dark. Beside me, I felt my cousin’s stillness.

“…Gone…Stairs?”

It was my father’s baritone voice speaking. Hana inhaled slightly.

“He was…Check…”

We both jumped. Beyond the darkness of my bedroom closet, a door slid open. Noiseless steps creaked atop loose floorboards. Pressing a hand to my mouth, stilling my breath, I watched two separate shadows cut across the stroke of light coming beneath the closet door. The only sound I heard was the creaking of my bed’s mattress. Then the room lapsed into silence.

If it were Umeko and Mother, I thought, they would come find us by now. My heart bruised itself against my chest with all its beating. My legs tensed and relaxed, then tensed again. I wanted my sure, negotiable father to be there with me―to hide behind. I watched the quivering strand of light.

All I could hear was our harsh, untamed breathing.

Then there was a swift sound, like a paper airplane cutting through the air, and the closet door was flung open. Hana or I shrieked. A long man, gaunt, lithe, and wearing all the supportive gear that made him a ninja of Hiroshi, stood before us, his shadow stretching across our faces. He grabbed Hana. A painted, wooden mask covered his face. Another intruder snatched my arm and jarred me onto my feet.

A third one murmured something. All I could think was that I had only seen two shadows. This man stepped in front of Hana and slowly tilted her chin up, like he was inspecting her for something that he had to see close-up. He paid me the same treatment, and I held very, very, still, not breathing. My eyes avoided his mask’s carved-out face.

He said something again, a quiet, monotonous word, and then Hana fell to the floor. Her eyes were partly closed, and her body shifted slightly where it fell, head rolling. I made a sound but couldn’t form her name. Even as they dragged me through the halls, their footsteps noiseless as my own bare feet slapped the floor, I couldn’t shake that limpness out of my eyes.

There was blood in the halls, but I didn’t notice it until much later, when I saw it on my feet.

…………………

I moaned slightly as the ninja traced four lines, intersecting one another, into the flesh on my wrist. He ran a finger over his work before letting my hand drop into my lap. I clutched at it as he stowed the knife out of sight and straightened.

He stood there for an ebbing moment, watching me. I followed his gloved hand as it found its way into the receptacle at his hip, and I feared he was pulling out the blade again. However, the object he retrieved was small and rounded… He gave it a slight shake, and I recognized it as the eye medication I had kept on my desktop at home.

I had been two days without it, and already my surroundings had morphed into disconcerting blurs of grays and browns. It was a condition I was all too familiar with by then, but not one I could fully comprehend. With the appropriate medication, I may have been able to maintain my eyesight for another two to three years. Without the medication, I would rapidly fall into permanent blindness.

Like a starving animal, I reached for it. The ninja held it high out of my grasp.

“If you’re good,” he said quietly, and I nearly hissed as he replaced it at his hip.

I waited until he had crossed the clearing and disappeared into the boughs of a corpse tree before turning my gaze on my wrist. He had etched some sort of symbol into my skin, and I held it close to my eyes, smoothing away the pale red residue with a finger.

The lines made it look like some kind of cage.

…………………

I slid the screen door open and stepped onto the porch. The evening was heavy, humid… A mosquito buzzed gently against my ear, and I took in a full breath. I left an open door in my wake as I padded to my father and tugged on his pants. He was sitting in a rocking chair, and it swayed hazardously as his strong arms lifted me onto his knee.

He sighed a great, heavy sigh; I giggled when his whiskers tickled my cheek. He was quiet tonight. Soon my gaze, attracted by some magnet, followed his to the heavy, laboring sun as it visited the other side of the earth.

I sighed my boredom and fell limp against him.

“Do you know where I was today?” he asked me.

I fidgeted, picking at a button on his collar. “Yes.”

“I was at work. We were visited by a samurai.”

A bug landed on my down turned eyelid, and I made a noise as I waved it away.

I felt my father’s arms tighten around me. “Do you know what a samurai is?” he asked.

“Mm.” I bought time thinking, then made a harsh movement against my father’s chest. “Swords!” I said with enthusiasm.

His eyes were unfocused, but he gave me a squeeze. “You’re right. He had a great, big sword. He also wore a full set of armor. He was very impressive.”

I didn’t know what the last word meant, but my father did not elaborate. His eyes were fixed on the sun’s steady collision with the horizon. I craned my neck, watching him watching it.

He stirred and looked down at me. He broke the silence: “Would you like to learn how to fight like Haru and Kisho do?” Haru and Kisho were my father’s apprentices.

I nodded vigorously, causing the chair to rock. “Yes!”

He seemed to consider me for a moment, then hugged me tightly. His sigh made my hair stir.

That evening passed my mind as I lay in the snow, my back stiff against the trunk of a dead tree. It was dark: the early winter’s night was scarred over with pale clouds and a bleak, white moon. That moon caused my memory to stir as I listened to my captor’s quiet, rapid breathing. He slept uneasily and woke every time I shifted, my movements scattering broken bits of bark into my hair.

My father had offered his life to the emperor, but even that couldn’t quench the great respect he held for the traditions of Japan. Through him, I had learned to respect these ways. The honest regard, the ways of the ninja, had seemed like something a narrator would lend to a good story. Though these traditions held no effect over my life, they somehow managed to fascinate me still.

It was a history that should have died. And yet it was here, breathing fitfully in the snow yards away, as real as I was.

I thought of my father’s tired eyes. He would not give up on me, and I felt the sureness of this thought propel the fatigue from my limbs. He had raised me to be more than a victim; a gambit in a game I didn’t understand. I was his inheritance―his pride and joy. Like my father, I had been raised to respect and revoke both sides of Japan.

So I swallowed down my tears and saved them for another time, another day when I might need them. I was the daughter of the great Masakazu, wasn’t I? It would take more than an ache to break me.

…………………

This story is very similar to a fan fiction I began a few months ago. It will only be a few-chapter story, so expect it to develop rapidly.

I’m looking for a beta reader. Leave a comment if you’re interested.

A critical grammar and plot review would be greatly appreciated.

- Every Thought