Shitless Botan

Diary

Botan never flinched, not once, not even the night he was up on the palace roof at Fushimi, sandals slick with rain, hammering discipline into men who'd already lost the will to hold their spears straight. Somewhere between the third strike and the lightning, an unseen hand found him in a place no hand should ever find a commanding officer, and Botan simply kept counting his blows, because fear had been surgically removed from him long before manners were installed. He knows better now, he tells you flatly, the way a man announces the weather: rooftops at night are for degenerates and ghosts, not discipline, and discipline itself turned out to be the most gropable illusion of all. These days he tries to whip his own vices into formation the same way, weed rolled tight as old regiments, floor prices watched like enemy troop movements, and every single time something unseen and unwelcome reaches in and ruins the formation anyway. He laughs about it now, gallows-calm, because the alternative is admitting the palace roof taught him that nowhere is safe, least of all the high ground he used to trust.