Page 58 of Brutal Unionn

She stops cleaning for a moment. Her hand goes still. The silence stretches so long I think maybe she’s angry. But then she resumes—slow, steady. “You’re not weak, Sho. Your father is weak.”

“That’s not what he thinks.”

“No,” she sighs, moving up to the curve of my knee. “It’s not. But your father was raised to worship stone. He thinks strength is being unshakable. But stone cracks, Sho. Stone breaks.”

I should tell her that stone is still stone. That father would hit her for not understanding that a cracked stone becomes jagged and more deadly. I should say something my father would say, but instead I lie.

“I wasn’t crying.”

She doesn’t look at me. “I didn’t say you were.”

Her hands stay busy—pulling antiseptic from the cloth bundle she always seems to carry, wetting another corner of the linen, gently wiping around the gash in my leg with careful strokes. It burns with every swipe, but I swallow down the hiss, and hold in the pain like I am meant to. She moves with quiet focus, as if tending to me is something sacred. I am afraid to tell her it is not. I am afraid to tell her I am no better than Riko and Benjiro. That it is true. She creates weak sons. I am a weak son.

“Do you remember the story of Princess Kaguya?” She whispers, her gaze stuck on the line of my wound.

“The moon princess?”

She smiles, just a little. “Yes. The girl found glowing inside a stalk of bamboo.”

“She leaves Earth at the end.”

“She does,” she nods. “But not before she lives here. Not before she’s loved, and feared, and misunderstood. Do you know why I think she cried when she returned to the moon?”

I shrug. “Because she was sad to leave?”

“No,” she says. “Because she was human for a while. Because it hurt to love people who couldn’t understand her—and still choose to love them anyway.”

She finishes wrapping the linen like a bandage around my leg. Tight, but not harsh, and ties it off with a string from around her wrist.

“She cried, Sho. And those tears weren’t weakness. They were the burden of someone who felt everything and still kept going.”

I finally glance at her. “So… it’s okay to cry?”

She meets my eyes. Really meets them, and the dark brown of her eyes twinkle under the orange haze of the sunset. “I’m saying pretending you’re made of stone will kill you long before a blade ever does.”

My chest tightens. I don’t want to cry more, but the words press up against my throat like they’re trying to escape. I clench my fists in my lap. “But Father said?—”

“Your father fears weakness because it reminds him he once had it,” she says. “He doesn’t hate you for crying. He fears what it would mean if he let himself cry, too.”

I swallow. “He wouldn’t like hearing you say that.”

She laughs lightly. Not mocking. Almost sad. “He hasn’t liked most of what I’ve said for years.”

I stare at her hands. They’re thin. Delicate. Not like Father’s hands—rough and knotted like rope.

She looks at me again. “Sho. Strength isn’t about hiding pain. It’s about surviving it. Enduring. Like bamboo.”

I frown. “Bamboo bends.”

She nods. “Exactly. And that’s why it doesn’t break. It survives storms that snap trees in half. It bends with the wind, not against it.”

I stare at the horizon. The sun’s dipping low now, casting the sea in gold. A fishing boat in the distance floats like a ghost. “I want to believe that,” I say. “But I don’t.”

She smiles. “One day you will believe me. When you bend, but don’t break. You will believe me.”

Present Day

The wind shifts. It’s warmer than I remember—thicker, more humid—but the rhythm of the waves hasn’t changed. I sit on the same beach, knees drawn loosely up, hands resting in the sand. The tide has pulled farther out, revealing broken shells and the jagged remains of seaweed clusters. My leg itches faintly where the scar runs—a thin white line carved across my skin.