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Toothbrush, sword, a change of clothes. Whatever else she needed, she could buy over there. All she could think of was seeing Mariko before she left.
She unknotted the cords, the obi, slipped out of her formal robe and into her streetwear. The shoji doors slid open just as she slid into her second striped stocking.
"I've heard it from grandfather," Mariko said, entering the room without a sound.
Yukio let the stocking hang limply around her knee, straightened and dashed forward.
"I'm going to miss you," she said, enveloping Mariko in a hug. It wasn't unusual for missions to separate them. They were used to sleeping apart for days, weeks even, but the distance became harder to bear every day.
"When will you be back?"
"I can't say."
"Write me often," Mariko said, thumb stroking the nape of Yukio's neck, before she removed her kanzashi. Yukio's hair uncoiled in a ruby cascade over Mariko's hand.
"Of course." Yukio smiled, a tight curl of lips. "Your inbox won't be safe from me."
They were supposed to be grown women now, no longer playmates from long ago, and they had grown, both up and closer, something undefined budding between them and knitting them together at the root.
"I wish I could stay longer, but my flight..."
"I know. Come back safe. I'll be waiting."
Yukio let go reluctantly. Mariko no longer needed her as bodyguard, but as an important person nonetheless. And Yukio wanted to be there to fulfill that role.