Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 40: Yukie, Kitaro: Back In The Village

A/N: I don't normally put these both at the beginning and the end, but circumstances call for it. Chapters 31-36 are now the tale of Gar being found by Kitaro, meeting up with Rose, and going to Nerima where the ghosts are. Chapter 37 is now Slade in Okinawa, 38 is Rose: Cherishing Girls Village, and 39 is Yukie: The Reconciliation Elegy. That's the order in which they actually happened.

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The museum room, small though it was, yielded a lot of information about 'Cherishing Girls Village'. It was not a tourist destination, but it did attract visitors for reasons unrelated to archaeology. Home to a number of traditional crafters and artisans, it boasted two or three pottery makers, someone who made handmade paper, an award-winning sake brewer of the sort Isamu used to be, and even a swordsmith. The inhabitants still supplemented their diet with wild fruits, vegetables and mushrooms from the mountainside, and the ecology was nearly pristine.

"Hey, this article says the tales of the Yuki-Onna may have originated here because of the mikos." Rose said, "because they were weather priestesses. Something like that."

Yukie looked up from the album of photographs. "Everything must start somewhere," she said. "Somehow I would find that…unsatisfactory, that the anthropomorphic personification of snow was no more than a human legend."

"Me, too. Hey, does your family come from around here or something? Because these people in the 'Annual Village Reunion' album—they all look like they could be your cousins."

"Really?" Rose was not the sort of person who thought all Asians looked alike, so Yukie crossed the room to glance through the photos herself.

"Yeah—see?" Rose pointed to a page. "You're kind of paler—heck, you're whiter than a lot of Caucasians—but the way your face is kind of diamond-oval shaped, with that short space between your nose and mouth, that's the same. And most of them are taller than the average Japanese person, too. Like you."

"I'm not sure I see it," Yukie leafed through the album. "There are two basic face-shapes, they say—round, or badger, and triangular, or fox. I have a fox face, which is considered more aesthetically pleasing, but badger faces are cuter." Yet she paused, because in the older women, she saw echoes of her grandmother's face. This was Aomori prefecture, and her grandmother had told Ra's Al Ghul she came from Shiga—but who knew if she had told him the truth? Perhaps this was where she was really from.

"Yukie," Slade called to her from the curtained off alcove toward the back of the room. "Come here a moment. There's something here I'd like your help interpreting." He sounded amused.

"Yes?" she asked, entering the space. "Oh! Oh…my." She suppressed a giggle.

"Exactly," he said. Behind the curtain was a collection of what might be called any number of things, shunga, marital aids, smut, or erotica.

"Well, everything here is meant to instruct couples on how to have daughters," she said, lowering her voice. "What position to use, when to do it, what to eat or drink, what prayers to say. There are a lot of factors, including the day of the month and the mother's lunar age at the time of conception. Apparently the best position is reverse cowgirl, done fast and hard. Is that how you made Rose?"

"Not that I recall," he frowned in thought. "What I wanted to ask about is—why is everyone in these woodcuts fully clothed except for the working parts? It sure as hell isn't for modesty's sake."

"Not everyone," she pointed out. "See? He's naked, because she…surprised him on the way to or from the bath. But the answer is, everybody has a body, but not necessarily one that looks good naked. My grandmother had a book of these. I found it on her shelf when I was…oh, about twelve. It was very instructive for a young girl, but I didn't realize that the men's working parts were, ah, enlarged to show detail."