15 Annuals, Chapter 2: The Bit With The Ninjas
Title: Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch (15 Annuals); CHAPTER 2, AKA The Bit With The Ninjas
Fandom: Tin Man. I should stop putting this part up. :/
Rating: PG! No sex, woe D:
Warnings: NINJAS.
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: The ninjas show up and Glitch's mom beats him up a lot! \o/
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1: That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER II:
AKA The Bit With The Ninjas
Two horses ambled through the forest, one carrying four packs and the other carrying a young girl in a red dress and the disheveled man holding her in the saddle. Large rocks covered in moss stood between the chilly trees, fog dusting the ground as dawn lifted from the gritty land.
“I still don’t get why we had to leave before dawn,” the young girl frowned, slouched comfortably against the man. “If you’re MY Glitch, shouldn’t that mean you do what I say?”
“Not one bit,” he said, grinning a bit viciously down at her. “A glitch is a problem. So really, even if I did do what you want, I’d probably do it wrong.”
The five men following the horses swiftly through the trees glanced at each other, amusement obvious even on fully covered faces.
“Now I want you to do something for me, Deeg,” the man that the little girl called Glitch said, putting her on top of the pack horse. “Can you promise not to scream for me?”
Sharp glances were exchanged between the men in the trees. The two horses slowed even more.
“What?” the little girl - Deeg, apparently - asked a bit breathily, blue eyes wide.
“You see, we were being followed since before I woke you up this morning, and I’ve been being very polite, but one of them has pulled out a knife, and I can’t be polite about that, now can I? Bad manners no matter how you look at it.”
Four pairs of eyes turned to glare at their youngest member, who guiltily revealed his half-unsheathed dagger.
Your fault. You go. three figures motioned, the fourth adding MORON onto the end of his signals. The youngest rolled his eyes, but complied, jumping down from the tree and facing the horses and their riders.
The man being called Glitch grinned, and the youngest blinked, ignoring the fuzzy memory of some similar grin from long ago. While he blinked, the man managed to punch him in the face and kick him hard enough on the side of the face to send him to the ground.
“Holy-” one of the men said before he could stop himself as Grapple hit the dirt.
Attack? one motioned. Observe? All eyes were flickering between the man called Glitch and the eldest man in their party.
“I would expect Kage to know their own,” the man now standing near the packhorse said, in perfect Kageri.
“Glitch, what’s going on-” the girl asked, but was shushed with a look.
What should we do? one of the men finally got up the nerve to signal.
The eldest closed his eyes, and jumped from the trees, a safe distance away from the man but close enough to be seen with his camouflage still on. The others followed suit, behind their leader.
“Who are you to know of our ways? Any Kage who leave are Kage no longer,” he said, looking intently at the man.
“Then I won’t talk as if I am one,” he said, switching out of the forbidden language and into the common tongue. “I’m…I’m Glitch, and this is Hime.”
The eldest gave him a scathing look. “Hime?”
Glitch gave him an innocent smile, not choosing to explain why he was calling the girl ‘princess’ in Kageri.
“Why am I Hime?” the girl frowned.
“Because I say you are?” Glitch said hopefully, and the girl just frowned as he turned back towards the Kage. “We’re going to the Kage. You can either escort us or try to stop us, and while I’m no longer Kage, I guarantee I used to be a very, very good one.”
“You’re too young to have ever been one of us,” one of the younger Kage muttered, but Glitch just shrugged, picking Hime up from the packhorse and placing her back on the riding horse. He held both reins in one hand and began to lead them towards the Kage.
Attack? one of them signaled.
The eldest frowned. “We follow them,” he said instead, knowing full well that Glitch would hear it.
The man turned back and gave them a vaguely familiar, friendly smile, before he started chatting with Hime, heading straight for the Kage as if a rope were wrapped around his waist and tugging him forward.
Gathering the youngest of their party, the Kage followed.
---
DG wasn’t quite sure what to make of what had happened in her life recently. First her own sister, or at least the Witch inside of her, had taken her life, only restored by her mother. She knew it wasn’t her own life - it felt older, knew things she hadn’t known before - but it was quickly adapting and becoming her own. It forced her to cling very hard to her memories to keep them intact, but she managed, all the while adding new ones to it.
She’d known her Glitch for a month. He was weird, and funny, and knew something about anything and managed to make practically everything around them interesting. Even these two weeks on horseback, he’d taught her about horses, about forests, and the people who lived inside of places that weren’t palaces.
The not-in-a-palace people had sounded neat, but now, meeting these people who seemed to loom behind them as Glitch walked their horses towards a sturdy wooden bridge, she wasn’t so sure about that.
“Do you have someone who will vouch for you?” the leader guy asked, and Glitch got that funny smile on his lips that she had yet to figure out before he turned around.
“Hana,” he stated simply. “She’ll probably beat me to death.”
All of them seemed a little surprised by whatever that meant, but Glitch was walking the horses across the bridge as two of the men behind them swarmed ahead, into the foggy, hilly, but thankfully treeless area. The remaining men were talking in that gibberish language to each other, and the road turned.
DG looked around, eyeing the strange, blocky white-green houses with tile roofing. Some were bigger than others, a few even reaching three stories, but they all looked…blocky.
“Why are the houses so blocky?” DG asked her Glitch.
He smiled at her. “It’s a long story, but it melts down to the fact they’re easier to build and harder to attack.”
“Why would you attack a house?”
“How about you stop asking questions for a bit and watch me get beaten up instead?” he said brightly, just in time for an older woman with coarse pitch-black hair in a firm ponytail and a very, very angry face to come over and smack him hard across the cheek.
“Ungrateful brat,” she hissed. “Never come back, we said. And you come riding back to the Kage with a child after beating a scout unconscious.”
“He pulled a knife!” Glitch defended. “You know no self-respecting man can take that-”
“You are no man,” she seethed. “Perhaps your little girl is right, and you are nothing but a glitch. A worthless little error while…while flipping your damn abacus like you used to. Ungrateful child, what we gave for you! Youngest full Kage in two hundred years and you leave to go play with your little gadgets and learn at some foreigner school!”
“Mother, I wouldn’t have come back if it weren’t for a very good reason, and you know it,” Glitch snapped.
His mother was obviously not as nice as DG’s, since she punched his jaw very, very hard.
“Sessha. Nanashi. These are the things you will be called while you take care of this…‘important reason’ of yours,” she said. “And what better way to atone for being such an ungrateful child than serving in the house that served you?”
Glitch winced, but bowed. “…your words are truth,” he said darkly, “but I humbly request that Hime come into our household.”
Glitch’s mom scoffed. “What is she, your daughter? Doubtful as that concept is…”
He said something in that gibberish, quietly and for his mom’s ears only, and she stared at DG in a very unnerving way.
“Hime indeed,” she said, and turned down one of the paths in the valley between the high, steep rocks that could have passed for mountains if it weren’t for the fact she could still see how precisely the giant, aged stones had been thrown into the ground.
---
Life with the Kage was something where you either adapted to quickly, or died. Every day, Glitch - no, Sessha, the Unworthy One, or Nanashi, the Nameless One, he was only Glitch to DG now - wondered what insanity had driven the Queen to have her daughter brought here.
He had it easy. It had been a while, but he was used to the routine. In the morning he’d scrub every inch of hardwood until it shone, make every plate sparkling clean, wash blood out of clothing as his mother’s spars became more and more intense, all because of him.
Of course, he had to clean the blood out of his own clothing too, considering the spars were usually with him. She liked to wake him up in the middle of the night and say how soft he’d become in twelve years, how his famous, beautiful style had become ragged and weak, how The Spiral would never be heard of and it was all because of him leaving to flick that abacus of yours, she would always say. The worst present we ever bought you. Ruined everything. Always, always the abacus, despite him accidentally breaking it at the age of seven.
But that was easy compared to poor DG. Used to a life as an actual child, she was thrown into the life of a Kage child, woken up at dawn to attend technique training, forced to go through exercise after exercise, to run laps around the entire valley, and then she came home to a lunch made by her Glitch, who despite his greatest efforts was a horrible, horrible cook with non-preservatives.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. For the Kage, their fighting techniques were completely individualized. Basic fighting techniques were taught during those morning sessions that DG slowly adapted to, but the true style, that came out with the family. In DG’s case, she had the misfortune of his mother being her technical family tutor, despite everyone knowing that Glitch - no, Sessha - trained with her after dinner. Which was even worse on her, considering that meant she was faced with two styles created entirely on the basis of defeating each other.
“At least she answers to Hime immediately now,” he muttered to himself as he stirred what he hoped would turn out as chicken soup. He was getting better, and she was getting better.
It had been funny, though, to see DG adapt to pants. He smiled at the thought. She’d been horrified, even called it ‘crossdressing’, and now, barely six months after her introduction to pants, she nearly winced at the thought of returning to dresses. He didn’t blame her. A dress would be twice the trouble when it came to the higher kicks anyway.
“STUPID STUPID BOYS,” DG snapped as soon as she walked through the door, taking off her shoes before she hit the hardwood, considering if she tracked mud (they’d hit the rainy season) into the house and he had to clean it up there would be no end to how many roundhouses he would force her through that night.
And oh yes, the other joy in his life. The little princess was learning to speak Kageri. More specifically, to curse in it thanks to her classmates. It took a lot of work for him - yes the only united front he and his mother would probably ever have - to keep her from becoming a potty mouth.
“What’d they do today, Deeg?” he asked, actually curious as he stirred the soup. It almost looked like real soup today. He was thrilled.
“They keep teasing me about my hair being too long,” she pouted, slouching into one of the seats around the table. “And they’re right! It gets in the way and I get hit in the face-”
“Who hit you in the face.”
DG blinked, clearly having forgotten the rule that regardless of training, no child would ever be intentionally physically harmed, and that if anyone disobeyed all the fury of the heavens (aka an angry Glitch re-polishing his deadly Spiral techniques and possibly a Hana too, which was also terrifying whether she smacked them or not).
“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant!” she said, suddenly back to being the timid six-year-old princess he’d met when he was literally blue. “I run into things when my head’s down and I forget to tie my hair back.”
“Then cut it,” Glitch suggested, getting a stare from his Hime. “I promise that hair grows back. And have you noticed how few Kage girls have long hair?”
“Hana has long hair,” she pointed out.
“Hana’s thirty-seven and been a full Kage since she was fifteen,” he said dryly. “I think she can take care of her own hair.”
The soup was actually soup, and that night, after Glitch had his own turn helping the princess into her own technique by very, very slow sparring, she gave him a kiss on the cheek when she looked in the mirror with hair cut to her chin.
His mother was waiting for him when he left DG’s room.
“Your Spiral is becoming what it used to be,” she said quietly.
He could only stare, the weight of the compliment banging against his head like a swinging bag of bricks. Even before he left, compliments had been rare.
“Thank you, Mother,” he whispered.
“Which is why it will become even greater,” she stated, but he could tell his mother’s throat was becoming choked up. “I am inviting others to further hone your technique. Do not expect our late-night sessions to end.”
“Of course not.”
“Also, the soup was actual soup today,” she smiled, pulling down her hair as she swept into her own bedroom. “At least Hime will be able to eat now instead of starving through half the day.”
She didn’t notice when she called goodnight to him using Kageri and called him son. He was too busy hugging himself and holding back a smile that would break the moon to even dare mention it.
---
Also, Chapter 3 is going to be out in, like...24 hours. I am writing this ridiculously fast.
Fandom: Tin Man. I should stop putting this part up. :/
Rating: PG! No sex, woe D:
Warnings: NINJAS.
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: The ninjas show up and Glitch's mom beats him up a lot! \o/
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1: That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER II:
AKA The Bit With The Ninjas
Two horses ambled through the forest, one carrying four packs and the other carrying a young girl in a red dress and the disheveled man holding her in the saddle. Large rocks covered in moss stood between the chilly trees, fog dusting the ground as dawn lifted from the gritty land.
“I still don’t get why we had to leave before dawn,” the young girl frowned, slouched comfortably against the man. “If you’re MY Glitch, shouldn’t that mean you do what I say?”
“Not one bit,” he said, grinning a bit viciously down at her. “A glitch is a problem. So really, even if I did do what you want, I’d probably do it wrong.”
The five men following the horses swiftly through the trees glanced at each other, amusement obvious even on fully covered faces.
“Now I want you to do something for me, Deeg,” the man that the little girl called Glitch said, putting her on top of the pack horse. “Can you promise not to scream for me?”
Sharp glances were exchanged between the men in the trees. The two horses slowed even more.
“What?” the little girl - Deeg, apparently - asked a bit breathily, blue eyes wide.
“You see, we were being followed since before I woke you up this morning, and I’ve been being very polite, but one of them has pulled out a knife, and I can’t be polite about that, now can I? Bad manners no matter how you look at it.”
Four pairs of eyes turned to glare at their youngest member, who guiltily revealed his half-unsheathed dagger.
Your fault. You go. three figures motioned, the fourth adding MORON onto the end of his signals. The youngest rolled his eyes, but complied, jumping down from the tree and facing the horses and their riders.
The man being called Glitch grinned, and the youngest blinked, ignoring the fuzzy memory of some similar grin from long ago. While he blinked, the man managed to punch him in the face and kick him hard enough on the side of the face to send him to the ground.
“Holy-” one of the men said before he could stop himself as Grapple hit the dirt.
Attack? one motioned. Observe? All eyes were flickering between the man called Glitch and the eldest man in their party.
“I would expect Kage to know their own,” the man now standing near the packhorse said, in perfect Kageri.
“Glitch, what’s going on-” the girl asked, but was shushed with a look.
What should we do? one of the men finally got up the nerve to signal.
The eldest closed his eyes, and jumped from the trees, a safe distance away from the man but close enough to be seen with his camouflage still on. The others followed suit, behind their leader.
“Who are you to know of our ways? Any Kage who leave are Kage no longer,” he said, looking intently at the man.
“Then I won’t talk as if I am one,” he said, switching out of the forbidden language and into the common tongue. “I’m…I’m Glitch, and this is Hime.”
The eldest gave him a scathing look. “Hime?”
Glitch gave him an innocent smile, not choosing to explain why he was calling the girl ‘princess’ in Kageri.
“Why am I Hime?” the girl frowned.
“Because I say you are?” Glitch said hopefully, and the girl just frowned as he turned back towards the Kage. “We’re going to the Kage. You can either escort us or try to stop us, and while I’m no longer Kage, I guarantee I used to be a very, very good one.”
“You’re too young to have ever been one of us,” one of the younger Kage muttered, but Glitch just shrugged, picking Hime up from the packhorse and placing her back on the riding horse. He held both reins in one hand and began to lead them towards the Kage.
Attack? one of them signaled.
The eldest frowned. “We follow them,” he said instead, knowing full well that Glitch would hear it.
The man turned back and gave them a vaguely familiar, friendly smile, before he started chatting with Hime, heading straight for the Kage as if a rope were wrapped around his waist and tugging him forward.
Gathering the youngest of their party, the Kage followed.
---
DG wasn’t quite sure what to make of what had happened in her life recently. First her own sister, or at least the Witch inside of her, had taken her life, only restored by her mother. She knew it wasn’t her own life - it felt older, knew things she hadn’t known before - but it was quickly adapting and becoming her own. It forced her to cling very hard to her memories to keep them intact, but she managed, all the while adding new ones to it.
She’d known her Glitch for a month. He was weird, and funny, and knew something about anything and managed to make practically everything around them interesting. Even these two weeks on horseback, he’d taught her about horses, about forests, and the people who lived inside of places that weren’t palaces.
The not-in-a-palace people had sounded neat, but now, meeting these people who seemed to loom behind them as Glitch walked their horses towards a sturdy wooden bridge, she wasn’t so sure about that.
“Do you have someone who will vouch for you?” the leader guy asked, and Glitch got that funny smile on his lips that she had yet to figure out before he turned around.
“Hana,” he stated simply. “She’ll probably beat me to death.”
All of them seemed a little surprised by whatever that meant, but Glitch was walking the horses across the bridge as two of the men behind them swarmed ahead, into the foggy, hilly, but thankfully treeless area. The remaining men were talking in that gibberish language to each other, and the road turned.
DG looked around, eyeing the strange, blocky white-green houses with tile roofing. Some were bigger than others, a few even reaching three stories, but they all looked…blocky.
“Why are the houses so blocky?” DG asked her Glitch.
He smiled at her. “It’s a long story, but it melts down to the fact they’re easier to build and harder to attack.”
“Why would you attack a house?”
“How about you stop asking questions for a bit and watch me get beaten up instead?” he said brightly, just in time for an older woman with coarse pitch-black hair in a firm ponytail and a very, very angry face to come over and smack him hard across the cheek.
“Ungrateful brat,” she hissed. “Never come back, we said. And you come riding back to the Kage with a child after beating a scout unconscious.”
“He pulled a knife!” Glitch defended. “You know no self-respecting man can take that-”
“You are no man,” she seethed. “Perhaps your little girl is right, and you are nothing but a glitch. A worthless little error while…while flipping your damn abacus like you used to. Ungrateful child, what we gave for you! Youngest full Kage in two hundred years and you leave to go play with your little gadgets and learn at some foreigner school!”
“Mother, I wouldn’t have come back if it weren’t for a very good reason, and you know it,” Glitch snapped.
His mother was obviously not as nice as DG’s, since she punched his jaw very, very hard.
“Sessha. Nanashi. These are the things you will be called while you take care of this…‘important reason’ of yours,” she said. “And what better way to atone for being such an ungrateful child than serving in the house that served you?”
Glitch winced, but bowed. “…your words are truth,” he said darkly, “but I humbly request that Hime come into our household.”
Glitch’s mom scoffed. “What is she, your daughter? Doubtful as that concept is…”
He said something in that gibberish, quietly and for his mom’s ears only, and she stared at DG in a very unnerving way.
“Hime indeed,” she said, and turned down one of the paths in the valley between the high, steep rocks that could have passed for mountains if it weren’t for the fact she could still see how precisely the giant, aged stones had been thrown into the ground.
---
Life with the Kage was something where you either adapted to quickly, or died. Every day, Glitch - no, Sessha, the Unworthy One, or Nanashi, the Nameless One, he was only Glitch to DG now - wondered what insanity had driven the Queen to have her daughter brought here.
He had it easy. It had been a while, but he was used to the routine. In the morning he’d scrub every inch of hardwood until it shone, make every plate sparkling clean, wash blood out of clothing as his mother’s spars became more and more intense, all because of him.
Of course, he had to clean the blood out of his own clothing too, considering the spars were usually with him. She liked to wake him up in the middle of the night and say how soft he’d become in twelve years, how his famous, beautiful style had become ragged and weak, how The Spiral would never be heard of and it was all because of him leaving to flick that abacus of yours, she would always say. The worst present we ever bought you. Ruined everything. Always, always the abacus, despite him accidentally breaking it at the age of seven.
But that was easy compared to poor DG. Used to a life as an actual child, she was thrown into the life of a Kage child, woken up at dawn to attend technique training, forced to go through exercise after exercise, to run laps around the entire valley, and then she came home to a lunch made by her Glitch, who despite his greatest efforts was a horrible, horrible cook with non-preservatives.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. For the Kage, their fighting techniques were completely individualized. Basic fighting techniques were taught during those morning sessions that DG slowly adapted to, but the true style, that came out with the family. In DG’s case, she had the misfortune of his mother being her technical family tutor, despite everyone knowing that Glitch - no, Sessha - trained with her after dinner. Which was even worse on her, considering that meant she was faced with two styles created entirely on the basis of defeating each other.
“At least she answers to Hime immediately now,” he muttered to himself as he stirred what he hoped would turn out as chicken soup. He was getting better, and she was getting better.
It had been funny, though, to see DG adapt to pants. He smiled at the thought. She’d been horrified, even called it ‘crossdressing’, and now, barely six months after her introduction to pants, she nearly winced at the thought of returning to dresses. He didn’t blame her. A dress would be twice the trouble when it came to the higher kicks anyway.
“STUPID STUPID BOYS,” DG snapped as soon as she walked through the door, taking off her shoes before she hit the hardwood, considering if she tracked mud (they’d hit the rainy season) into the house and he had to clean it up there would be no end to how many roundhouses he would force her through that night.
And oh yes, the other joy in his life. The little princess was learning to speak Kageri. More specifically, to curse in it thanks to her classmates. It took a lot of work for him - yes the only united front he and his mother would probably ever have - to keep her from becoming a potty mouth.
“What’d they do today, Deeg?” he asked, actually curious as he stirred the soup. It almost looked like real soup today. He was thrilled.
“They keep teasing me about my hair being too long,” she pouted, slouching into one of the seats around the table. “And they’re right! It gets in the way and I get hit in the face-”
“Who hit you in the face.”
DG blinked, clearly having forgotten the rule that regardless of training, no child would ever be intentionally physically harmed, and that if anyone disobeyed all the fury of the heavens (aka an angry Glitch re-polishing his deadly Spiral techniques and possibly a Hana too, which was also terrifying whether she smacked them or not).
“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant!” she said, suddenly back to being the timid six-year-old princess he’d met when he was literally blue. “I run into things when my head’s down and I forget to tie my hair back.”
“Then cut it,” Glitch suggested, getting a stare from his Hime. “I promise that hair grows back. And have you noticed how few Kage girls have long hair?”
“Hana has long hair,” she pointed out.
“Hana’s thirty-seven and been a full Kage since she was fifteen,” he said dryly. “I think she can take care of her own hair.”
The soup was actually soup, and that night, after Glitch had his own turn helping the princess into her own technique by very, very slow sparring, she gave him a kiss on the cheek when she looked in the mirror with hair cut to her chin.
His mother was waiting for him when he left DG’s room.
“Your Spiral is becoming what it used to be,” she said quietly.
He could only stare, the weight of the compliment banging against his head like a swinging bag of bricks. Even before he left, compliments had been rare.
“Thank you, Mother,” he whispered.
“Which is why it will become even greater,” she stated, but he could tell his mother’s throat was becoming choked up. “I am inviting others to further hone your technique. Do not expect our late-night sessions to end.”
“Of course not.”
“Also, the soup was actual soup today,” she smiled, pulling down her hair as she swept into her own bedroom. “At least Hime will be able to eat now instead of starving through half the day.”
She didn’t notice when she called goodnight to him using Kageri and called him son. He was too busy hugging himself and holding back a smile that would break the moon to even dare mention it.
---
Also, Chapter 3 is going to be out in, like...24 hours. I am writing this ridiculously fast.