Assassin Fuzen

Diary

Fuzen once took contracts the way a monk takes vows, silent, precise, finished before the ink dried, but the grey mists of that particular morning finished him instead, doubling him over with a betrayal of the bowels just as the woman he loved delivered the other betrayal, the one with words. He tells it now like a blade unsheathed slow: heartbreak and dysentery arriving hand in hand, neither announced, both merciless, and somewhere in that fog his old discipline slipped its leash and never came trotting back. These days he keeps a den behind a noodle shop that smells of tatami mold and bad decisions, dealing cards with the same patient stillness he once used to wait for a target's last breath, except now the only thing dying is everyone's floor price. He still tries, some dawns, to sit seiza and breathe like the old masters taught him, back straight, mind empty, but his knees ache, his dice itch in his sleeve, and by the third breath he's already counting chips instead of counting breaths. Fuzen doesn't call it failure. He calls it an open contract, one he intends to close eventually, the way he intends to do most things eventually, which is to say never, but with excellent posture about it.