Yuuki

Diary

Yuuki once stood the dawn watch at Sekigahara without flinching, the kind of man who could hold a line while arrows found other men's necks, and he carries that same flat, unbothered courage into a Tuesday breakfast that nearly kills him. The mist off the harbor was doing its slow grey theater thing, the kind of morning that used to mean an ambush, and instead it meant a bowl of grilled mackerel he ate like a man with something to prove to nobody. A bone lodges sideways in his throat, and in the four seconds between panic and salvation something in him locks into old training, breath control, stillness, the calm of a blade drawn a thousand times, and he coughs the thing out with the grim efficiency of a man parrying a killing blow. He tells the dojo it sharpened his reflexes, that adversity forges the warrior, and technically his hands did get steadier that week, though everyone privately agrees the true lesson was to chew. He still orders the fish, every single time, some tiny stubborn discipline insisting he can master what already humiliated him once, and every single time the floor of his dignity dips a little lower than his last trade.