kh_drabble | [#289 - Minor Character] Stranger From the Sky (Reply)

Title: Stranger From the Sky
Challenge: [#289 - Minor Character]
Word Count: 598
Summary: Mulan is not the girl she once was. That said, neither is the silver-haired man who just fell out of the sky and nearly knocked her off her horse.

They found him in the snow. He wasn’t buried, as Shan-Yu had once been, but lay in a snow-crater as if he had fallen out of the sky. He was shirtless and only just turning blue. The men wrapped him in horse-blankets from under their saddles and Shang hustled him across his own mount to reach their encampment faster.

Mulan didn’t acknowledge suspicious glances that still came her way when people thought she wasn’t looking. Just because the emperor declared she could stay in the army didn’t mean everyone liked it. They tolerated but didn’t accept her. You couldn’t destroy generations of beliefs overnight. To them, a woman was still just a woman, no matter her military record. She stood outside the medical tent and waited with tunnel vision for Shang to emerge.

“He’ll live,” he answered her unspoken question. “So what do you think?”

“We shouldn’t make snap judgements.”

“Easier said than done.” Shang’s gaze flicked to the rest of the camp. “Everyone saw what he looked like.”

Mulan’s arms were folded over her chest. She bound her breasts to keep them from flopping about as she ran and rode and fought as good as any man. She knew about looking different in this crowd. “We should wait until he wakes to ask who he is.”

“And why he was out here half-naked.”

“That too.”

She didn’t blush. She was beyond that these days. The girl who had balked at bathing in the pond had grown into a warrior who only let down her guard in the privacy of her own tent when Shang took one end of her bindings and unwrapped. They had rituals of tracing each other’s scars and shedding their public personas with every touch. Fighting the Mongol horde, invading armies and Heartless had cemented a bond no social niceties or embarrassments could break.

Shang didn’t pat her arm, but she felt him not do it very acutely. It was comforting in its own way; loving yet respectful. He understood how much harder she had to work for her reputation.

A dynasty later the medical officer allowed them in. The tent smelled of liniment that made Mulan’s nose wrinkle. The stranger was in a bedroll, hair splayed. What she could see of his body was sculpted and scarred like a warrior’s, but she couldn’t think what warrior would allow hair that long or free. Hair in battle was a liability unless tightly bound.

As she and Shang approached, he opened his eyes.

“What’s your name?” Shang asked without preamble.

The man blinked at the tent roof.

“I am General Shang of the Imperial Army,” Shang said with all the gravitas that hard-won title deserved. Not one step behind him, Mulan watched the stranger curiously. “What’s your name?”

The man’s gaze slid to them. Mulan had never seen eyes like that; brilliant green, pupils thin like a cat’s. They were predatory eyes; the kind that made even shopkeepers and housewives reach for invisible swords at their belts. Their expression, however, was blank.

“I… don’t know.”

“You don’t know who you are?” Shang frowned. “Do you know how you came to be injured?”

Mulan remembered the strange stumpy growth on the man’s back, which had stained the snow around him red. It wasn’t a gouge or cut like any she had seen before. It was like a limb had been cut off, the way she’d seen arms and legs severed by powerful sword swings on the battlefield. It was no ordinary injury, nor was this any ordinary man.

“No,” the silver-haired stranger said, an edge of panic in his voice. “I… don’t remember anything at all.”