Cheery Haru

Diary

Haru laughs it off before anyone can ask, because that's the trick, that's always been the trick, and he laughs even now with his gi peeled open and both nipples weeping like they too lost everything at the Hidden Teahouse tables. He'd wagered the whole fief on one more hand, one more spin of fate, grinning the entire time like a man who already knew the punchline, and when the floor dropped out beneath his ancestral lands he simply grinned wider and called it liquidity management. The other patrons flinched at the sight of him, chest striped raw from some cursed dice-and-blade side bet he can't quite recall agreeing to, but Haru just dabs the blood with a teahouse napkin and declares it battle scars from the war on sadness. Underneath the cheer sits an old discipline, the samurai who once meditated at dawn before duty, now trying to rebuild himself through a memoir he insists will be titled 'How I Won By Losing Everything,' though he hasn't written past the dedication page in three weeks. Still he smiles, always smiles, because somewhere beneath the bandages and the empty fief and the half-finished book is a man determined to bleed cheerfully all the way to enlightenment.