Rurouni Kenshin Fan Fiction ❯ Ai Yai Yai: A Modern Romantic Story ❯ Memories ( Chapter 3 )

I have to apologize for my previous chapter, though I meant Kenshin to be as harsh as he was (because I wanted to make him very `Battousai'-esc as possible) I think a lot of people were turned off by just how mean he was to Kaoru. I hope that all of you readers will just bear with me a little longer! I wanted to try something different, and different means risking how my readers see me as a writer, but I think it will all turn out nicer than you expect (; . Don't worry though, you'll see as you read that Kenshin isn't as cruel as he seems, just a little misunderstood. But then again, as a writer I sort of enjoy picking on my characters before I make them happy. It's terribly bad of me, but I like it anyways. Read on…

 

Recap:

“I guess you should,” She retorted, “Since you know my house so well by now.” Kaoru watched him go, admiring the sinewy muscles sculpting his bare back and puzzling over why she talked so callously to this man in particular. He set her off balance in some way. His danger and mysteriousness bothered her, and yet drew her towards him. He was strong-she knew that much already-but she also noticed an array of scars speckling his skin. What had she done to get caught up in such a mess? Unconsciously, she traced the outline of an X across her left cheek.

Chapter 3

Memories

Thanks to Princess-in-Training,

happyloveygirl, goldenpromise, and summer_star

for reviewing!

-I-

It was summertime, and raining. Kenshin had never particularly liked the rain, for it had always seemed to make his job that much harder. If there was one thing good about it though, the cleanup was then that much easier. It's that much easier to slip into the shadows and disappear, he had thought to himself, to not exist at all.

It had been one of those wet, humid evenings. As usual, he was given a target, a place, and a time; and as usual, that was all he had needed. It had started out as any other assassination until the rain began to fall heavily. As he followed his victim, his shoes began to slosh and his clothes to hang heavily off of his shoulders. Frowning slightly, he went in for the kill, with some difficulty because of an unexpected turn of events. The victim had a gun. Not to be deterred, the assassin finished him off as if it had been as easy as covering his mouth to yawn, and the job was done.

He waited silently, watching the rain water mingle with blood and wind its way down the alleyway, when he heard a hushed, delicate voice over the rain. “It seems you have made it rain of blood.” Kenshin whirled around to see a woman in a white dress, a violet shawl, almost black in the darkness, thrown haphazardly about her shoulders beside the handle of a purple umbrella that rested there. Her skin was so white that it seemed as if he was looking at an old black and white photograph. The only color besides her shawl and umbrella came from her outstretched hand and her dress, the red of blood being smudged and washed away by the coursing torrent of water.

Kenshin's scowl deepened. He had no use for others to know of what he had done, but yet he had no way to deal with the situation than the kill this woman who had obliviously condemned herself because of him. His expertise was in killing and then retreating silently into the shadows as if he had just been a specter of the night, not in cleaning up what shouldn't have happened in the first place. For that matter, this area should have been cleared; there was no tangible explanation that this woman was here except if she herself was supposed to be here. There was no way a normal civilian could have gotten this far without being stopped…

The assassin squinted at the woman; suspicion began to creep into his heart like black ink spreading in clear water. He didn't want to kill her, it was against any moral that he had come to feel as right, but yet he had no other choice. What would he do otherwise? Take her captive? There was no way the people he worked for would want to deal with her. Their motto on anything like this would be, “Better their neck than ours.”

“What is your business here, miss?” He asked nonchalantly, as if he was out for nothing more than an evening stroll in the summer rain. The woman took a step towards him, looking entirely unfazed, if not a little serene. “Otou-sama sent me,” She said. As if her last statement was not of any interest at all, she mentioned in a softer tone, “You kill, but the blood does not faze you. I wonder if you know why?” Kenshin ignored the woman's remark, but it was hard to act indifferent when something in the way she said it struck a chord deep within him, stirring something he had thought he had numbed a long time before. He quickly silenced that chord like putting a hand across harp strings to stop the ringing of a solitary note.

Instead of giving this forward woman the satisfaction of his attention, he said just as casually, “Tell him that people of the night-those who don't exist in the light of day-cannot mingle with others like them, or they will become real.” The woman raised an eyebrow, clearly becoming amused. “I am not a woman of the night, Himura Battousai.” She said, letting a throaty laugh permeate, but not escape her full lips. The sound made the assassin shiver slightly, and he wondered whether it was out of uneasiness or pleasure. Everything about this woman seemed to nock his feet, which seemed so firmly rooted in the ground, out from under him.

The woman pulled a gun from beneath the folds of her shawl in one smooth, fluid movement, almost like a dance, and leveled it between Kenshin's eyes. Kenshin, helpless to her cold, piercing stare, stood there and waited. “This is the last rain of blood that you will ever make, sword-hearted man.” She said, hand steady on the trigger. The woman closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in a fresh breath of air to assure herself of what she was doing, and pulled the trigger. The shot of a gun echoed through the empty street. The woman exhaled.

“I'm not that easy to kill,” A cold voice told her as she opened her eyes. There he stood, sword raised, her bullet buried into the hand-guard of his sword. The woman stumbled back in surprise, fumbling to shoot the gun once again. Another shot rang out, the Battousai shifted to one side, bullet speeding past him to hit a whitewashed wall behind him.

“It's no use,” He told her, “give up now, and your death will be quick and painless.” The woman's legs gave out underneath her, even as her mind resolved to fight to her death. An unwanted tear ran down her cheek, but all the strength she had just minutes before had completely left her body. “Why?” She asked, her voice trembling, “Why can't I kill you?” She felt the cold steel of a blade across the left side of her long, slender neck; the tender skin felt the bite of the blade and the hot blood beginning to fall, staining her already soiled white dress. Spreading like a disease.

Then the pain stopped suddenly. The blade lowered, and she heard the man sigh. He pulled the woman to her feet, looking her in the eye. Amber met deep brown. “You're Hakubaikou, the White Plum, are you not?” He asked her, his voice quiet but crystal clear in the pattering of the rain. More tears began to flow, “I am not an assassin any more… not now that I have brought the shame of failure unto my name,” The man felt her begin to shake under his grip.

“I am the White Plum no longer,” She said, her voice barely audible through her tears, “I am simply Tomoe.” Simply Tomoe. And yet she wasn't, she wasn't a simple woman. As Kenshin looked into her eyes, he felt a deep sorrow there, a strange and beautiful loneliness.

“I promise, Tomoe, that you have nothing more to fear from me.” He said, letting her go. His eyes widened in surprise as he collapsed onto his chest, sobs of joy and sorrow wracking her fragile form. “I will protect you.” That night Kenshin felt some lost door open and something fill the dark hole in his heart. That night, he fell in love for the first time.

-II-

Kenshin awoke to the smell of something cooking. Stir-fry. His stomach rumbled, he was hungry. Sitting up, he groaned, the pain shooting up his side. Remembering where he was, he groaned again, wincing as he climbed out of bed. Shuffling to the kitchen, he settled himself in a bar stool pulled up to the counter. Kaoru, engrossed in a pan that had begun to smoke on the stove didn't notice him sit down. She swore loudly as she turned the stove off and blew furiously at the smoldering pan, trying to save the last remains of something that hardly smelled, not to mention looked, like stir-fry anymore. Sighing, Kenshin got up quietly, reached under her arm, and took the pan from her.

“You really aren't good for anything, are you woman?” He asked as he discarded of the mess into the compost tin she had next to her sink. Covering the tin, he began to clean off the pan of the burnt material still clinging to it. “I told you to stop calling me that,” Kaoru retorted, trembling slightly, either from the fact that he had come up behind her without her knowing so easily, or because his hand had brushed her own when he had taken the pan from her.

“If you know so much about cooking, you try it,” She said, irritated. Kenshin, though, had already been rummaging through her fridge as she talked, and the ingredients were laid out on the counter neatly. She shivered at the thought that he knew almost as much about her house as she did, leaving the kitchen dejectedly. “I hope your stir-fry burns.”

-III-

The night they came to take her back, Kenshin had been working late at the small farmer's market stand the two owned down the street. He wiped his hands on the front of his white apron, hefting a bag of the day's leftover vegetables on his shoulder. Fishing for the keys to his mo-ped in the front pocket of his apron, his phone rang. A jingling tune emitted from it, its joyful singing cut short as he pressed the `talk' button. “Moshi-moshi,” he said into the receiver after seeing his apartment number flash across the screen. A smile crept across his face, anxious to hear Tomoe's soft voice in his head again.

“Kenshin… they're here…” Tomoe's voice was rushed and urgent, her heavy breathing drowning out parts of her words as she whispered into the receiver, “Don't come… kill you too…” Kenshin dropped his bag onto the sidewalk, staggering against his bike. How did they find us? I made sure there was no way… “Tomoe, you have to get out of there,” Kenshin said firmly, making up his mind, “I'm coming to get you, hang on!”

“I… love…you…Ken-” The line went dead, Kenshin's phone began to beep monotonously before a bright voice informed him “Your call has been disconnected, please hang up and try your call again!” He slammed the phone against the pavement, beside the bag of vegetables, picked up his keys and sped off into the dark towards the apartment.

-IV-

It was eerily quiet when he got there, the quaint front garden, tended lovingly by Tomoe, was peacefully undisturbed. There was no sign of struggle, nothing was upturned or dishelved. Everything was perfect. He unlocked the door, wondering if Tomoe's call had all been some strange misunderstanding, when he smelled it. The scent of white plum, the perfume Tomoe had only used while she was an assassin. The house reeked of it. Tuning on the light, a gruesome scene was laid out before him. Two men, one splayed out on the floor, a strange cloth cape stained darker black with blood around his shoulders, his emaciated body looking almost childlike and sad; the other hung over a chair as if he had fallen there, wearing traditional shinobi clothing, a sword dangling from his cold hands. They both lay in puddles of fresh blood, a broken bottle of perfume mixing with the red sea, iron and flower tinged his tongue. He swallowed, forcing back the bile that welled in his mouth. Turning over the man on the floor, Kenshin grimaced as he saw the deep gash cut from his navel to his chest. Laying him back down, he made his way to the other man. He looked away as he realized that the knife she had used this morning to make breakfast was sticking out of his side.

Unable to handle the grisly evidence of Tomoe's battle, Kenshin pulled up a chair, turning it so he would not have to see either of the bodies. He sat, head in hands, as he felt the weight of what had happened begin to drop onto his heart. Tomoe was gone. Dead or alive, he did not know, but she was gone. He had been too late to save her. He knew that if they had found them, it would be all over. Otou-sama never took kindly to people who betrayed him, and it was quite obvious, though they had both chosen to forget about their pasts, that Otou-sama had wanted Kenshin dead even before he had spared the White Plum. I couldn't protect you Tomoe…I promised I would, but I couldn't protect you.

There was a strange noise behind him, and the creak of a chair against the floor. Jumping up, Kenshin backed up to feel his foot hit the wall. The man splayed over the chair only minutes before was standing shakily, holding the knife that had been imbedded in his side in his hand, blood gushing freely from his open wound. Kenshin looked for something, anything, to use to defend himself, but the attacker was much too quick for him. Pinning him against the wall, the man's eyes wide with pain and a crazed excitement, he plunged the knife into Kenshin's side. Kenshin let out a cry of anguished agony as he collapsed over the blade, the irony of Tomoe's knife cutting at his heart.

Turning him over roughly, the man pulled the knife out of his stomach unceremoniously. Feeling his hot blood against his skin, Kenshin pressed his hands to his side to stop the ravenous flow. The other man smiled, holding the bloody knife above him like a prize. Squatting next to him, he forced his face up. “It hurts doesn't it?” He said, his smile unwavering. “Otou-sama wanted you to know, he wanted to be here to see this, but he couldn't stand to see how your skills have dwindled. He leaves you this message: The strong live,” He sliced a gash along his left cheek, “ the weak die,” The man's smile twisting his face like a deranged child, as he pulled the knife across his face again, forming a cross, “That is the way of the warrior.” Letting Kenshin's head fall roughly to the ground, he picked up his dead companion and made to leave.

“Where…where is she?” Kenshin forced out, his words so cold the air seemed to freeze as it left his lips. The man just kept smiling, and then he was gone, the only proof he had been there in the first place was the blood staining the floor. The strong live, the weak die, Kenshin thought, I will not die.

Tomoe, I've lost you. Now I understand the depth of your suffering, your loneliness. You were living with a pain like this. It must have been hard for you… You must have hated me; I wasn't able to protect you. But in the end, you protected me. You allowed me to live, maybe even at the cost of your life. But now are you free from your pain? I will continue to shoulder this burden. It will serve as my atonement for what I did to you. For all the people who died protecting me, and those whom I have killed. It will be difficult, but I will be all right. I have lived a hard life, but I will always remember the warmth of your love.. I will... live on…

 

Glossary

Otou-sama-respectable term for father

 

Kenshin- literally “Sword Heart/hearted” (Ken-sword, shin-heart/core)

 

Shinobi-another name for ninja

 

Hakubaikou-Literally “white plum”, it is mentioned that Tomoe wears this scent in Trust & Betrayal (the Rurouni Kenshin/Samurai X OAVs) and is also referred to later on in the manga.

 

Author Notes

Finally it has come to the time of year I dread and love at the same time: Finals, my birthday, and the end of school. Because of these things I cannot guarantee an update next week, but I hope you will all stay with me and keep reading and reviewing anyways! Thank you all very much for your understanding -dodges random reader-chucked object- T____T