Chapter Text
Hanako eyes her up and down, from the strands of her oddly colored hair, down to her rumpled clothes but pristinely kept twin kodachi. She chews thoughtfully on her pipe, blowing plumes of thick smoke out of her nose as she does.
"Those all you can use?" she croaks.
Sakura shakes her head.
"I'm proficient with kunai as well," she says. "The bow and arrow, as well."
Hanako nods slowly, wisely. Sakura keeps still, aware that she's being sized up.
It wouldn't be the first place that's turned her away. Warrior women are looked at with wary eyes outside of the hidden villages. They're in samurai country; unless she's wed to a samurai, she has no place wielding their weapons like she's one of them.
Yet here she is, pink haired, armed to the teeth, and dressed as plainly as her station will allow. She had been cast out for nearly three months, had picked up odd jobs that would sustain her. Mostly had taken to gambling when she could; she had a decent amount of luck, but she needed steady work.
People didn't want her. Her swords made them turn her away. Her arrows made them lift their eyebrows and scoff. And if that didn't do it, her ridiculous hair color certainly did. She would curse her father for giving it to her if he had not been the one who had fought to keep her in the family, even against his own father's wishes.
Her father had given her the kodachi before she bolted into the night. She had only planned on taking her bow and quiver with her, but her father had pressed the two scabbards into her hands and told her to go without fighting him.
She had wandered. Given a wide berth because of her weaponry and because of her strangeness. She had walked for days. Offered her services as a bookkeeper or a washer woman. She could set her hands to any available task, if only someone would let her. She would take shelter or meals instead of pay.
It had all landed her here.
"Won't be much need for the bow," Hanako says, smoke from her pipe stinging Sakura's eyes. Still, she does not blink. "Unless you can hunt. Can you hunt?"
Sakura can put an arrow in a man's eye from across a battlefield. Her arrows fly as fast as any hawk this side of Konohagakure. If she wants to kill something, she can kill it.
"Yes, ma'am, I can."
"And those knives of yours," Hanako continues, voice creaking and hard. "You can keep them hidden on your person?"
There are nine up her sleeves right now. Hanako's men had disarmed her for the most part. She had let them think she had removed all of the kunai by giving them the holster she had attached to her thigh. But the knives in her sleeves weighed them down, their cool metal pressing sweetly into the soft, scar speckled skin of Sakura's arms.
"Yes, ma'am, I can."
There's one man in the room. Grizzly bearded and experienced. Old enough to be one of Sakura's uncles, her mother's brothers. If she remembers properly, his name is Rokuro. And the one outside who had her bow and quiver was Yoshiaki.
He had tried to take her kodachi when she entered the teahouse. Sakura barely had time to refuse. There was plenty of outside work that people would let her do without disarming herself so. If whoever ran this teahouse wanted an armed guard but not one who would enter her property armed, let her be a hypocrite in peace.
Rokuro had known better. Had looked at Sakura, really looked at her plain clothes and her many weapons. She still isn't sure how he did, but he understood.
Besides, it wasn't business hours. It was much too early in the day. The boys and girls were all asleep, tucked away with another guard standing sentinel at the stairs. What good (or harm) could one pink haired girl do against an old woman like Hanako, even armed as she was?
Rokuro let her pass, and Sakura was grateful for it.
"I'll take you for a week," the old woman says.
A cough interrupts her, one of her own. It rattles in Hanako's chest, deep and almost violent. A hacking cough, one that will probably take her life, if it hasn't already tried. From the look of her, Hanako is the kind of woman who such coughs balk at.
"A week," Hanako continues once she catches her breath. "To see how you fit with the boys. You'll have meals and a bedroom, though a simple one. Once I'm sure you're not the awful type, we'll see about pay."
Sakura doesn't need to wonder about what 'the awful type' means. Fukiage was a mixed teahouse. Those who protected it couldn't damage the merchandise. It gave Sakura a week to be on her best behavior, though she doubted she would have even displayed anything bad for Hanako or her men to see. A week's worth of food and a bed to sleep in was more than she had gotten from anyone else.
Things must have been tight at Fukiage, if Hanako were offering a strange and armed girl such accommodations. It's something Sakura notices, but pays little attention to. She's got an odd appearance; she's noticed that word of her will travel ahead of where she plans to stay and eke out a living next.
She had asked around in the town around dawn, if there was anyone looking for an extra pair of hands for work of any kind. Some people had looked at her like she was crazy. Others ignored her. A couple gave her directions towards the flower district.
Sakura had swallowed her pride. It had - it had stung to have someone tell her that she ought to work on her back if she was desperate enough to ask random townsfolk if they needed their clothes cleaned for a bowl of miso soup. But that hadn't been what they had meant at all.
There were flowers in the district that needed protecting. And even if Sakura found no work there, at least the townspeople could have a good laugh at her when she left in shame.
And maybe they would laugh at her still, now that she had started to nestle herself into the lush gardens that stretched around Fukiage. But at least she'd go to sleep with her stomach full, and she wouldn't have to rise before the sun did to start walking before she overstayed her welcome. At least she wasn't sleeping in barns, or underneath trees.
At least she was only named after a flower, and wasn't one of them herself.
"Alright, Sakura-kun," Hanako says, her easy voice not even tripping over Sakura's lack of surname.
It stings in a way that it shouldn't. She's been nameless for months now. It shouldn't matter to her that she belongs to no one. No one except for herself at least.
Hanako gives her a grin, tipping out the ash in her pipe to fill it again with strips of bright green leaves.
"Welcome to my garden."