The Top
By Hikari Tsuki Chi
Disclaimer: I do not own Rurouni Kenshin.
Summary: Y'know that top Kenshin has with him in the first OVA? I think it's called Reminisce? I know it's called Samurai X Trust and Betrayal. Anyway, when he burns down the house that he and Tomoe lived in with her body in there, he left his top in there. So I thought that leaving it behind held some special meaning, since he had it ever since he was a kid.
Note: Hi there, the whole top thing has been bugging me ever since I first watched Trust and Betrayal; don't know what its proper name is. But anyway, the whole idea behind it has been bouncing around my head for a while, so I decided to write a story about it. I haven't seen anything like that before so I figured why not? 'sides, it's not like I have any clue whatsoever regarding MI:SotP. PotP I have some clue but I still have some more work before the next chapter can come out.
The TopThe top was the one thing I could take with me when I was sold to the slavers. On my fifth birthday my brothers pooled what little money they had between them to get it for my birthday. I remember that I was in shock when they gave it to me, and I was smiling for days after that. The other children in our village picked on me, with my flaming red hair, odd colored eyes, and paler skin than the others, due to my mother's family. My brothers had had to deal with it somewhat, the insult thrown at them dealt with our mother, calling her a gaijin. Most older brothers picked on their younger siblings, but they protected me.
I was eight when the cholera came through our village, striking down over half of our number. My family didn't catch it at first, tending to those who had been hit and their fields. They caught it from them. They died, one by one, my mother being the last one to go. She said not to be sad, that she would be with my father and brothers in a better place, and that I would see them again.
The slavers came on the last heels of the cholera. Our village, needing the money, sold off the orphans, reducing themselves to the barest number needed to repopulate the village, unable to feed the extra mouths. The other orphans were sold off quickly, since no one wanted an odd-looking slave. A jumble of words talking about purity of blood and society, things that go over every child's head, but the meaning was clear. I wasn't wanted.
The top kept me company, since most of the people were women and girls. It was the one link I had to my family. It made them feel closer to me, like they were watching over me, like in my mother's stories. And I now feel that it was them that lead Shishou to me.
It had been a year since I had started traveling with the slavers. Three sisters had been sold to them, to pay off some debts. They looked after me almost since the moment they saw me. Amane-san, Kasumi-san, and Sakura-san were like the sisters I never had. I only knew them for a day.
Our group was attacked by bandits that night, striking down everyone. I was the only boy there, and since I had no family left, I was willing to throw away my life to save those girls, so that they could survive. But they pulled me back, into their arms. They begged with the bandits, asking them to spare me. Amane-san, I think, told me to that I hadn't had a chance to chose my own way of life and that they had lived theirs. She asked me to live, for her.
I was fully ready for the bandits to kill me, but then he came. Hiko Seijuro the XIII, master of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu, although I didn't know that at the time. He sliced down the bandits, and told me that he had taken care of my revenge, and to go into town and tell them what had happened. Waiting until he left, I began to dig graves for the victims, slaver and bandit. They were just bodies now anyway. It took me a week to bury the bodies. Since they had protected me, I felt that the sisters deserved special graves, with better markers, but I couldn't find any good stones. I couldn't even find any flowers.
Standing there in front of their graves, wondering what I was going to do now, he came back. He commented on the fact that I had made graves for all of them, and I said that they were bodies anyway, and that they were slavers, not my parents, that they had died from cholera the year before. He asked who the three stones were, and I told him. He asked my name, and I, curious as to why he was wondering at all, told him. Shinta. "That's too gentle a name for a swordsman. From now on, your name will be Kenshin. I promise to give you the best training I have to offer." Is what he told me that day. I was now his apprentice, training in the art of swords.
The fighting in Kyoto was heating up in the months after I turned thirteen, and, as I grew closer to fourteen. I began to argue with Shishou, saying that we had to get involved. Or rather, I wanted to. I didn't want people to live in a world where the weak are fodder to strong. Shishou argued back with that the Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu was created to protect the world created after war, and that the whichever side that our sword style chose would be guaranteed victory, and that my sword would drag me down into madness. But despite that, I left him.
Katsura noticed me when I went to sign up. He wanted me to go to Kyoto with him, to kill for him. He asked me if I had ever killed before, and if I could. I said that I wanted to help create a world where people were free, and I accepted the job.
My first kill surprised me. The numbness in my bones, the knowledge that I should, by all accounts, be sick, yet wasn't, was foreign to me. It was like I wasn't the one who did it, like I just watched my body do the deed. When I got back to our headquarters I washed my hands, and tried to sleep, but keep seeing blood everywhere. Blood itself wasn't something I was unfamiliar with, since my family coughed it up in their last days and what had poured from the bodies of the three sisters, but seeing it on my hands and my sword, even after I knew I had cleaned them, scared me inside. So I played with my top instead.
During the first six months as I killed more and more people, I within into the shell I had built for myself. That shell is what protected my innocence, buried underneath the bloodstained hands of Himura "Hitokiri" Battousai. My odd-colored eyes, for which I was teased for as a child, grew even odder, turning a cold amber color, a sign that I was losing myself in the bloodshed, killing yet getting nowhere. My top was my only retreat, reminding me that I was still human when the others in our group were sure that I was a demon. Yet at the same time it made me sure that my family would hate me for what I was doing.
It was that one assignment that stirred something inside. Kiyosato Akira, one of the people guarding my target. His will to live was so strong, that it gave me the first part of my scar, piercing my defenses and scratching my left cheek. His injuries were great, but he wasn't dead. He kept saying that he didn't want to die, and stuttered out a woman's name as I dealt the killing blow.
It never healed properly, bleeding every time I killed. My Shishou taught me swords, while I taught myself how to drink, though it wasn't hard, remembering how Shishou always had to have sake. I remembered what he told me about sake: "In spring, cherry blossoms by night. In summer the stars. In autumn the full moon. In winter snow. These are always enough to make sake delicious. But if it tastes bad, that's proof there's something sick inside of you." My sake tasted like blood, so that was proof enough for me that I really was a demon from Hell.
I was jumped going back to the headquarters, assassins sent to kill me. I was seen, by a woman. She saw that I made bloody rain. Her name, Yukishiro Tomoe.
She was unusual, I guess. I never had had any experience with women beforehand so I wasn't one to judge. She cared for me, when most others avoided me. I guess that I began to fall in love with her. All I knew was that gradually my food and drink began to taste like white plums, her perfume, rather than like the blood of my victims.
When the Ikeda-ya happened Katsura told me to hid in the country, and that a married couple was less suspicious than a single man. Personally I think he set us up, or rather set her up to be the sheath for my wild and drawn sword. We did get married properly, and were husband and wife in every respect. I was happy, truly happy, for the first time since my family died. I was content with my Shishou, but I never felt true happiness there.
I remember when I woke up the second day of the New Year to find her gone. I didn't believe that she was part of a group trying to kill me, trying to find my weakness. So I set out to find her, following her footsteps in the snow into a forest.
Entering the forest I felt…strange. Every sound made me jump, when in all reality they shouldn't have startled me so much. The first challenger took me by surprise, and he explained that in this forest, unless you have trained in this forest, then you couldn't sense anything. The first challenger, while I did kill him, activated a trap that damaged my hearing. The second challenger activated a trap that damaged my sight.
The last challenger was with difficult. Without the senses I normally used to fight I was striking blind, while he could see perfectly, and was able to strike me. Knowing I couldn't keep with up forever, I decided to throw away my life into one last attack. It was like with the sisters, I didn't care whether I lived or died, just so long as Tomoe was safe, and lived. I hardly noticed that my sword hit extra resistance. But what I did notice was the smell of white plums…the smell of her perfume. I had killed my wife, the woman I loved. My cheek was numb, and I noticed that as her tanto fell, it had scratched my left cheek, bisecting the scar I had received all those months ago. She was smiling when she died, yet there were tears in her eyes. Her last words said that she was sorry.
Days past after her death. Katsura came to visit just as I found out that I had killed her fiancée. I had destroyed her happiness. Katsura gave me a new job; one that took me out of the shadows and into the light while someone else took over the role as the shadow hitokiri.
After Katsura left, and as I prepared to burn our home, I came across my top. I held it in my hands, remembering how my brothers had given it to me, and how it was the only thing I had left of my family and of my childhood. By samurai law I was a man, but I was never a samurai. Himura, the last name I took, was one my family had in secret, the name my mother's father took when he washed up Nihon's shores. But this top was a sign of my childhood innocence, and I was no longer a child. I lost my childhood innocence when my sword sliced through Tomoe. I left it in the home while I took Tomoe's diary, scarf, and hairpin, to entrust at the shrine where her ashes were buried. I never looked back as the house burned, as my top burned. In my mind this showed that I was no longer an innocent, that I was no longer a child. I would bear the scars on my cheek and on my heart as a symbol of my lost innocence, and as a symbol of my vow to Tomoe that once the war was over, I would never kill again.
Looking back on it now, as I do laundry for Kaoru-dono, I do not regret my choice. Watching Kaoru-dono chase Yahiko around the dojo, Sanosuke arguing with Megumi-dono, with me catch in the middle, trying to do the laundry before Kaoru-dono started throwing things at Yahiko or Sanosuke and they decide to use me as a shield, getting the laundry dirty again, I felt happiness. Tomoe had written in her dairy that while I had destroyed her first happiness, I had given her a second happiness. That was what I was doing as well. I had destroyed my first happiness, but I was creating another. I didn't need my top anymore. It was what had gotten me through my family's death, my time with the slavers, my training with Shishou, and my early days in the Bakumatsu, where I was losing myself in the shell of the hitokiri. But with Tomoe's death, I no longer needed it. And so, I held onto the memory of the comfort it gave me, to remind me of my desire to create a world where people who are just trying to live their lives can live. People like who Shinta would have been if a number of things hadn't happen. Innocents, like what I was once, but what I am no more.
I suppose that is why I can live on in this new Meiji Era, to protect the innocent. So no more innocents like Shinta have to lose their innocence and fill their bodies with the ice-cold blood of war and become like Himura "Hitokiri" Battousai. I fight for my innocence. My Lost Innocence.
owari
Well what do you think? Please Read and Review, I need the support! Also flames will be used to roast marshmallows and the flamers themselves will be given to my cousin, Koinu-chan16. Mind you, I started this at nearly midnight and left it at 1AM so I could get some sleep and finished this at 1:27 PM. So cut me some slack!