Two months.
Two months of mornings that felt like mornings were supposed to feel something worth waking up for waiting on the other side of sleep. The sharp looks from the townspeople hadn't stopped.
His father hadn't changed. But Mui had learned, in the way that children learn the things that save them, to move around the edges of the cold and find the warmth that existed in spite of it.
On a bright morning he climbed the mountain path where Leon and Ryuuken and Rui were already waiting, their breath making small clouds in the crisp air.
"Hey! What are we playing today?" he called up to them, moving faster than his footing justified.
The snow came up to meet him before he finished the sentence. He went down face-first with the particular completeness of a fall that doesn't allow for any dignified recovery, and by the time he pushed himself upright all three of them were already there.
"Are you okay?" Leon's hands were already moving over him, checking.
Mui raised both arms and gave him the widest smile he had. "I'm fine! What are we playing?"
Leon exhaled. Ryuuken laughed the full, uncomplicated kind. Rui smiled quietly.
Then Leon looked at Mui's leg and his expression changed.
"Show me."
He didn't wait for permission. He crouched down and examined the gash in Mui's leg with the careful attention of someone who has spent enough time around injuries to know when to be concerned.
"That's actually bad," Ryuuken said, leaning over Leon's shoulder.
"He's not even crying," Rui observed, with the tone of someone noting something that doesn't quite fit.
"Doesn't it hurt?" Leon looked up at him.
"I'm fine," Mui said. "Can we play?"
Whether he genuinely felt no pain or had simply decided not to acknowledge it, the result was the same. During these two months he had grown so attached to these mornings to Leon stopping his missions, to Ryuuken's laugh and Rui's quiet steadiness that he treated anything threatening to interrupt them as simply not worth registering.
"The activity we planned doesn't require him to run anyway," Rui said, glancing between Leon and Ryuuken. "Remember?"
Leon's face shifted immediately. "Oh where are they? Did they arrive?"
"Right there." Rui pointed down the slope.
Ryuuken's eyes lit up with the specific brightness of someone who has just remembered something wonderful. He scooped Mui onto his back without asking and started moving.
"Let's go!"
Mui didn't know what they were heading toward until he saw them a pack of Huskies arranged in a line, breath steaming, a large sled hitched behind them. In the northern territory, these sleds served for both travel and sport, and from the look of them these dogs knew exactly what they were here for.
"I want to ride them!"
The words came out of Mui before he'd consciously formed them. Pure, unmediated joy.
"It was Rui's idea," Ryuuken said, eyes shining. "I can't believe you thought of something this good."
Rui smiled with quiet pride.
Leon looked at his friends for a long moment both of them, standing in the cold with their breath clouding and their expressions completely genuine and said, softly: "Thank you. For thinking of him. For all of this."
Ryuuken and Rui looked at each other.
Then they both burst out laughing.
"Don't be a nerd," Ryuuken said, recovering first. "Friends don't say thank you."
"Besides," Rui said, reaching out to ruffle Mui's hair, "your brother is our brother."
They loaded onto the sled Mui at the front, Ryuuken directly behind him, then Rui, then Leon at the back and Ryuuken gave the command and the dogs lunged forward and the world became speed and cold air and the sound of four people shouting at the top of their lungs as the slope took them.
Mui screamed with pure happiness, his voice carrying across the white mountain face.
"I want to be happy with you guys forever!" he shouted into the rushing air. "The mountains and the snow and the animals and all of you I hope nothing ever takes any of it away!"
"Nobody's taking the mountains," Ryuuken shouted back from directly behind him, grinning. "This region has never been conquered. The terrain and the cold make it impossible soldiers can't move in a straight line here, supply lines collapse, the weather kills you before the enemy does."
"Your father defended this land with three hundred men twenty years ago," Rui called from behind Ryuuken. "Against a Great Noble House. We have over a thousand now. Nothing gets through."
"And nobody is taking you away from us either," Leon said, from the back. Quieter than the others, but carrying further somehow the kind of voice that doesn't need volume to land. "No matter what happens. We will always be with you."
"Friends forever!" Ryuuken shouted, and the dogs pulled them faster, and the mountain fell away beneath them.
They stopped at a frozen lake in the afternoon, fishing in the particular companionable silence that comes from people who don't need to fill every moment with words. Leon caught the most fish, which he accepted with the composure of someone who expected nothing less.
They cooked on a small fire at the lakeshore and waited for the food in the thin winter light.
Rui, apparently deciding the moment called for entertainment, began to sing.
"In a frozen land,
Were four friends,
Dreaming sweet nothings,
And saying nonsense..."
He sang with the full commitment of someone who considers this a genuine gift to the assembled company.
Ryuuken nodded along. Leon nodded along.
Mui stared at him.
"You sounded like an old man with back pain," Mui said.
The other three looked at him with identical expressions of mild offense.
"That was actually decent," Leon said.
"Everyone has different taste," Rui said generously.
"Maybe you're just tone deaf, brother," Leon added.
"What's tone deaf?" Mui asked.
Nobody answered him. Leon turned back to the food. Mui decided this was deeply unfair and ate his fish in dignified protest.
Evening came the way it always did in the north fast, complete, the sky going dark before you'd finished deciding the afternoon was over.
They walked back to the estate together, Mui on Leon's back because his leg had started to ache in the way of injuries that have been politely ignored all day and have finally lost patience. At the gate, Leon waved to his friends.
"Tomorrow," Ryuuken said, pointing at Mui. "More games."
"So many games," Mui confirmed from Leon's shoulders, waving back as Ryuuken and Rui disappeared down the path.
Inside, Leon tucked him into bed with the efficient care of someone who has had practice at this.
"Rest. Your leg needs it. I'll wake you when dinner is ready."
Mui pulled the blanket up and looked at his brother in the dim light.
"Big brother," he said quietly.
"Yes?"
"I want to be happy always."
Leon looked at him for a long moment without speaking. Then he pulled the blanket up further and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Mui was asleep before the latch clicked.
He woke to darkness and silence and the specific complaint of a stomach that has been waiting longer than agreed.
The room was fully dark. No sound of servants in the corridor. No smell of dinner from the kitchen.
Did big brother forget?
He climbed out of bed and padded into the hallway.
Empty.
He checked the kitchen. The living room. The basement. His father's office, which he rarely entered and found no less uninviting for the darkness. Every room he tried gave him the same answer silence, absence, the particular quality of a space that has recently held people and no longer does.
He went to the garden.
Empty there too. But something was different here.
A smell. Metallic and thick, coating the back of his throat in a way that made him want to breathe through his mouth instead. He didn't know what it was. He had never encountered it before.
"Big brother?" His voice came out smaller than he intended.
He moved past the estate gates, following the only instinct available to him.
His foot caught something in the snow and he went down hard, his injured leg flaring with real pain this time, genuine anger rising in him before the fear could arrive.
"Stupid rock--"
He reached back and grabbed it.
Pulled it into the light.
His mind tried to process what his hands were holding and couldn't. It tried again. The shape was wrong. The weight was wrong. The texture--
It was an arm.
A human arm, severed at the shoulder, the flesh torn and the bone showing at the joint.
Mui's hands opened. He didn't drop it so much as his hands simply stopped being able to hold it.
He looked up.
The snow around him was not white. It had not been white for some time. Human heads lay in the snow at intervals, their faces locked in expressions that hadn't had time to become anything except what they'd been in the last moment.
Eyes removed. Chests opened. The carnage arranged with the specific quality of something that had happened very quickly and without any particular drama not the aftermath of a battle, but something more efficient than that.
Somewhere behind him the emergency bells were ringing. He had heard them, he realized. He had heard them the whole time he was walking through the estate and had simply not registered them because he was looking for Leon.
He sat in the snow and looked at what surrounded him and felt his mind reach for a response and find nothing.
Not terror. Not grief. Just a vast, complete blankness the specific shutdown of a child's mind encountering something so far outside the boundaries of their world that there is simply no framework available to hold it.
The ground began to tremble.
Blue flames moved toward him across the snow slowly, with the deliberate patience of something that is not in a hurry because it has nowhere it needs to be. They didn't spread or gutter or respond to the wind. They moved as though directed.
The bells kept ringing.
Mui couldn't stand. He understood distantly that he should move, that movement was an option available to him, and found that his body had made a different decision.
Then he saw her.
She came out of the smoke and the blue light like something that had always been there and had simply chosen now to be visible.
195 centimetres tall, silver hair moving behind her in the heated air. A face that belonged on a shrine somewhere the kind of beauty that has been sharpened into something that doesn't invite admiration so much as recognition of a force.
Her eyes were the deep blue of water with no bottom, and they held no anger, no hatred, no heat of any kind. Just a depth that went further back than anything Mui had vocabulary for.
Her sword was no longer the color of steel. It was deep red not stained, not wet, but coated so completely and thoroughly that it had simply become a different object. It caught the blue firelight and held it.
The flames followed her. Not around her after her, trailing at her heels and rising behind her shoulders like something that had attached itself to her out of preference. The heat they produced vaporized the snow before it reached her, leaving a ring of mist that clung to her figure and moved when she moved.
She stepped over things in the snow without looking down.
She looked at Mui.
Her expression did not change. There was nothing in it that needed to. She looked at him the way weather looks at you not cruel, not kind, simply present and absolute and entirely indifferent to what you think about it.
Mui had run out of fear somewhere between the arm and the heads. What remained was something quieter and more total the complete cessation of resistance that comes when a person encounters something so far beyond their ability to affect that the body simply stops pretending otherwise.
She was not a person.
He understood that with the clarity that children sometimes have about things adults have learned to rationalize away. She was something that wore the shape of a person. Something that walked through graveyards it had made and found the experience unremarkable.
She was a Law.
She was what happened when the world decided something needed to end.
She looked down at him in the snow and the blue flames rose behind her and the bells rang and rang and rang.