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"What are you doing?" Jack asked.
Ashi looked up in surprise.
The last time they'd passed through a town, they'd bought her some basic hygiene supplies: toothbrush, floss, a hairbrush, a portable mirror, a small first aid kit. Ashi had also grabbed a small nail care kit—to Jack's surprise, considering her blunt and dirty fingernails. But then, he'd thought, maybe that was why she wanted the kit.
Maybe not.
Ashi was sitting in front of the campfire, one hand holding her pocket mirror, the other holding the nail file in her mouth.
She mumbled around the file, "Bru'hing my deeth?"
Not sure whether to worry or laugh, Jack said, "That's... not a toothbrush."
She pulled out the file. "Okay, I'm filing and then brushing and flossing—but you know what I mean. It's a file day."
"What's a 'file day'?"
"It's the..." Suddenly looking uncertain of herself, Ashi asked, "Do you file your teeth every day?"
"I don't file them at all."
"What? Let me see!" She leaned around the campfire, staring at Jack's face. He automatically opened his mouth, feeling more self-conscious of his appearance than he had in years, hoping his beard wasn't hanging over his lip and obscuring his teeth and hoping his breath wasn't too bad as she stared. After a moment, she said, "But your teeth are sharp!" She pointed at her own canines. "These ones!"
"They come like that," Jack said, letting his jaw relax. Noting Ashi's pout of consternation, Jack asked, "Were... you told that you have to sharpen them?" When you were younger, he didn't need to say. By whoever it is that raised you.
Ashi scowled, nose wrinkled and nostrils flaring in anger. That was a yes. "We were told we must keep them sharp and deadly. That if our blades, our bodies, and our claws failed us, our fangs were our weapon of last resort. And, keeping them sharp also honors..." She made a vague gesture upward, the sign she'd adopted to indicate the tyrant she'd been raised to see as a god when she was too mad to say his name.
What kind of people had raised Ashi, Jack wondered—less out of curiosity and more out of anger. Ashi had told him very little about her past; all he knew was the vaguest outline of the religion she'd been raised with, and that somebody must have dressed her and her sisters and taught them to fight. The rest was a void, peppered with small revelations where Jack deduced something she must have learned at home because she couldn't have learned it anywhere else. "May I see?"
Ashi leaned closer, opening her mouth for Jack to inspect, the firelight glinting red on her pearly whites. (Her breath smelled like death; he was immediately less insecure about his own.) On both top and bottom, the tips of her canine teeth had been shortened til they were barely even with her incisors; they looked sharp enough to draw blood with a mere prick.
On top of everything else—her cult had forced her and her sisters to file their teeth to look more like their god?
"You should stop filing them," Jack said, as Ashi sat back. (She almost automatically stuck the file in her mouth again, then caught herself, put it down, and grabbed her toothbrush.) "It will damage your teeth."
Ashi shrugged, unconcerned. "They'll just grow back, right?"
Jack slowly shook his head. "Teeth do not do that."
Ashi nodded, emphatically. "They do! I lost all my teeth when I was a child and new ones replaced them. All my sisters did too!"
"That only happens once."
"What!"
"As a child, your milk teeth are replaced by your permanent teeth. Then you keep those for the rest of your life..."
Ashi had started worriedly licking the point of one tooth with her tongue. Which looked so ridiculous that Jack had to cover a laugh with a cough. "Well—your teeth look healthy." Short and too sharp, but not cracked or obviously decaying. "Perhaps they have not been significantly damaged."
"Mm." Ashi finished brushing her teeth in thoughtful silence; then her eyes fell on the file again. "If this isn't for your teeth, what do people use it for?"
"Their fingernails."
At Ashi's skeptical look, Jack laughed and reassured her, "Those grow back."
"If you said they didn't, then I'd know you're lying."
####
A few weeks later, Jack noticed that Ashi had filed her fingernails the way she used to file her teeth: short, but to a deadly point.
He also noticed that he'd been right about the filing damaging her teeth; her teeth were becoming crooked, coming out of alignment, as though her mouth wasn't sure where to make room for her canines. All four had been pushed slightly ahead of her other teeth, so that they were more prominent when she opened her mouth wide enough to expose them.
Which wasn't very often. She kept her mouth so small—small smiles, small frowns, small voice. She only seemed to fully open her mouth in anger and in battle.
Jack first noticed her teeth had come out of alignment shortly after they'd retrieved his sword. Just before dusk, they'd crossed paths with a particularly desperate desperado who'd looked at Jack, looked at a crumbling weather-worn wanted poster plastered to a nearby window, and drawn a gun.
Before Jack could draw his blade, Ashi had taken out the would-be bounty hunter with a kick, a punch, and a snarl, her lips curled back in anger. For a split second, Jack had glimpsed her as the setting sun beyond her set her face on fire, shining flame red off her black hair, seeming even to make the edges of her teeth glow with fiery light. Her canine teeth stood out from the rest, tilted ever so slightly outward from her jaws.
He decided not to say anything to her. If her teeth got any worse or started hurting, they could seek out a dentist to inspect them. Otherwise, she was already insecure about her teeth—sometimes Jack caught her nervously licking their shortened, sharpened tips—and he didn't want to unnecessarily worry her.
Besides—selfishly, he thought her crooked canines were kind of cute.
####
He tried not to think too much about her how cute her teeth were, hidden behind her lips, as they ventured into drier and drier lands.
He tried not to think too much about the last time he and a dark-haired dark-eyed warrior woman had crossed the desert together.
####
The first time he kissed Ashi, he realized her canines felt slightly longer than her incisors.
####
It was several days and several millennia before Jack had an opportunity to bring it up, once they were in the past and his people had been liberated.
(Ashi was surprised and somewhat offended to learn his real name wasn't "Jack"; he told her that he'd been known by his future name twice as long as he'd been known by his past name. She still called him Jack when they were alone.)
He was sure now his sense of touch hadn't been deceiving him in the heat of the moment.
Some of Jack's people were working together to topple the towering statues of their oppressor they'd been forced to fill their land with; Ashi, in far better physical shape than the malnourished former slaves, had grabbed a rope and pitched in.
("I could probably topple them all in an afternoon if I used my lasers," Ashi said later, "but I don't want your people to think..." And Jack understood. They hadn't told anyone where she'd come from. They hadn't even told anyone that he'd gone anywhere but straight to the tower and back. Jack asked, "You still have them?" She said, "I've been practicing my aim when I'm alone. Just in case... I don't know. In case we need it someday." And Jack understood.)
As she'd strained to help pull down another pillar, she'd clenched her jaw and bared her teeth; and he'd seen her long canine teeth grind against each other, fighting for space.
"Are they loose?" Jack asked that night, worried they might be lengthening because they were slowly coming out by the roots. He hoped not. Here in the past (funny how he didn't think of it as "the present"), the nearest dentist he knew was in Africa.
She tested one tooth with her tongue and shook her head. "No. They feel fine."
"Huh."
"Maybe you were wrong," she said. "Maybe they do keep growing."
He laughed awkwardly. "I could be." Although he doubted it. "Mine haven't grown."
"Maybe you're just not old enough yet," she teased, with a small smile that didn't show her canines. "You stopped aging in your twenties, right? Physically, I'm a couple of decades older than you."
Icy shock filled Jack's stomach. "You are?"
"Yes?"
"How—?" That was too hard a question to ask. He switched to an easier one. "How do you know? You said you do not know your birthday! I taught you to read a calendar!" (She'd been perplexed by the grid of numbers and words posted on a wall at the train station, and even more perplexed when Jack had given it a quick glance and told her the next train headed toward their destination came in two days; he'd drawn a crude calendar and taught her the days of the week on the train.)
"Well, yeah," she said defensively, "but I can tell when seasons pass. I kept count of the first snow each year. I'd counted forty-one winters by the time our training was complete, and I must have been a few years old before I started counting."
Jack wracked his brain for anywhere in the world that had two winters a year; but Ashi had told him she and her sisters had been sent after Jack when they'd received word that he was passing near their stronghold. He knew that land didn't have such strange seasons.
"Is something wrong?" Ashi asked.
(The first time he'd seen her dying sister's face, he'd feared he'd killed a child.)
"No," Jack said quickly.
(When she told him that she'd trained her whole life to kill him—that as soon as she learned to walk, she'd been taught to kick—he'd thought that must have been about as long as he'd trained to kill his target: just shy of twenty years. But she had been her cult's prisoner for more than twice as long?)
"No, you just—look really good for your age."
(Until she'd met him, the only face Ashi had ever seen was her own—repeated six times—and her god's, carved in stone. She did not know how forty-year-olds looked. She did not know she was nearly his mother's age.)
She smiled, but it looked worried.
####
The kingdom's doctors—the ones that hadn't been executed for practicing their trade—all had their hands full, now that they were finally permitted to treat the aches and ailments they'd been forced to watch fester all these years. It was several days before Jack could catch one that wasn't too busy or too exhausted to talk.
He told Jack that, yes, sometimes adults had new teeth grow in—at the very backs of their jaws, fighting for space with their other molars. But in the front? No. Did existing teeth ever grow longer? No.
Jack was glad he'd done his due diligence in asking, but he hadn't truly needed to. He'd known what the answer would be. He should have realized as soon as he learned where she'd come from.
When she had been coated in the ashes of the Pit of Hate, a darkness so absolute it made her look like a silhouette rather than a three-dimensional body, her shape had reminded him, distantly, of another woman cloaked in darkness. Sometimes, when he'd seen Ashi from the corner of his eyes, when the lighting was just wrong, before he turned to see her straight on, he thought her skin was green.
One night, when Ashi and Jack and his parents and several laborers and samurai were gathered around a campfire near the new palace's construction site, and they all finally felt relaxed enough to laugh together for the first time since their nightmare ended—Jack watched the way the fire made the edges of Ashi's teeth glow, and realized that fire didn't have that effect on anyone else's faces.
Before, he'd heard her giggle a couple of times—too few times—a shy, nervous sound. But this was the first time he'd seen her laugh openly since she'd prayed to her god to tell him the samurai was dead.
When he'd heard her laugh then, all he'd heard was spite. He was surprised that now, knowing her innocence, knowing there was no malice in her voice, her laugh sounded almost the same. It sounded... not evil—no, of course not evil—but...
Her laugh had an edge to it. It made her sound older than she looked. (Or, made her sound closer to her true age, perhaps.) Her laugh was lower than he expected, raspier; it sounded unused and unpracticed.
It faintly reminded him of another laugh he'd heard by a campfire; one he hadn't known he'd remembered so clearly.
Ashi still had lasers in her eyes, she'd said.
Ashi could breathe fire; she had shown Jack in private, one night, when they'd stolen away from the others to do things that might have been acceptable between a betrothed couple in the future but that would scandalize anyone who saw them here. (Her mouth had tasted like overcooked meat; but it hadn't felt like it.)
When Ashi pitched in with labor that was heavy even by her impressive standards, sometimes Jack caught sight of her sharp fingernails bulking up into claws; her bones shifting shape to accommodate the weight; blackness moving under her skin like an ink blot tattoo, and then vanishing, the same way if you lifted your finger off a sunburn you could see a blanched patch of skin return to red.
Ashi had said she'd felt him leave her; but though he must have let loose of her soul, clearly he was still in her blood.
And as Jack watched her laugh, fire in her teeth and a ghost in her voice, he saw that the tips of her canine teeth had begun, ever so slightly, to curl outward.
Jack had been wrong. That woman whom he had never and would never meet, that woman who bore her god's daughters and told neither him nor them—she had not forced Ashi and her sisters to file their teeth to look more like their god.
It had been to look less like him.
Jack felt eyes on him, and glanced to his side; his mother was giving him a knowing look. He felt a jolt of panic, wondering what it was she knew, until he realized he had been smiling at Ashi.
She was healing from the damage her mother had done to her.
And her tilted teeth were still cute.
####
As their wedding day approached, Jack began rehearsing how he'd explain Ashi's lineage to his mother and father, when they noticed. Because eventually, inevitably, they would notice.
He would not ask Ashi to keep her mouth small for them.
He would not tell her to file down her fangs.
####
When he kissed Ashi, he felt the tips of Aku's teeth twisted out toward him, like they were trying to catch on his lips.