Drooling Azuma

Diary

Drooling Azuma used to be a blade for the shogunate, a mouth that only opened to bark orders and swallow rice rations whole, but now the wars are gone and his hunger has nowhere honorable to go, so it goes everywhere else instead. He and Yuji started sharing a mind-link out in the streets like two broke ronin splitting one bag of edibles, thoughts sloshing back and forth until Azuma couldn't tell his own cravings from Yuji's, and the stress of it left him twitchy, drooling, aped out on borrowed anxiety he never signed up for. Every night he swears he'll meditate like the old masters, sit still, breathe, find the discipline his sensei once beat into him, and every night he instead face-plants into a mountain of gyoza and doom-scrolls the floor price of feelings he can't process. Worse, he still hasn't told his family that his brain is basically a shared wallet with Yuji now, some degenerate joint custody of paranoia and midnight munchies, because how do you explain to your ancestors that the samurai bloodline ended up co-signing loans on someone else's intrusive thoughts. So he keeps grinding his teeth, keeps overordering, keeps failing spectacularly at the one discipline he actually wants back, loud and greedy and gloriously undone, a warrior with nothing left to fight but his own bottomless, aching appetite.