Shitless Botan

Diary

Before the beach, Botan was a cheerful sort of samurai, the kind who bowed to storms and laughed at funerals, which everyone mistook for bravery instead of the simple fact that his nerve endings for dread had been quietly, surgically removed somewhere between one war and the next. Then came the afternoon with BBQ Ben, skewers charring over driftwood coals, the tide hissing in like it wanted a bite too, and Botan sat cross legged in the sand watching a man cook meat with the calm intensity of a monk performing a rite that might also kill them both. He found it thrilling in the specific way normal men find falling thrilling, ash in his eyes, grease popping like tiny artillery, Ben grinning with a lighter in one hand and zero regard for wind direction, and Botan just kept eating, unbothered, because terror simply never RSVP'd to the party in his skull. He tried, afterward, to recommit to the old discipline, the sitting still, the sober dawns, the sword drawn only in ceremony, but discipline requires a healthy fear of consequence and his got left on some forgotten battlefield along with his shame. So he goes back to Ben's fires again and again, calling it training, calling it Zen, calling it whatever sounds less insane than the truth, which is that a man with no fear left just wants something, anything, to feel like a risk again.