Colony 6: Inland Sea I, by DarkBeta
(Ruruoni Kenshin is not mine. This first chapter is a boring list of names and relations. If you can slog thru it, i think the next one will be better. [kowtows abjectly])
[Tokyo, sakura season, 1881]
Shura was proud, watching Uncle Iwa greet the passengers for the Yasuo's maiden voyage. Nineteen passages from Kyoto to Edo (well, eightteen if she counted only the ones who paid) was not a bad start. The hidden compartments belowdeck were mostly empty, but that was just as well. The hold full of overpriced pottery and a crate of kitchen knives made for a good, legitimate cargo.
They couldn't afford enough wood to make firing up the engine worthwhile, this voyage, so wind would blow the ship's stinks forward. The Yasuo's stern cabin went to Fujita Goro's household (a sword-carrying policeman, his wife, two sons, and a couple of servants), returning to Edo from a stint in Kyoto.
(You were supposed to call the city Tokyo now, but that would never last. The port had always been Edo. In a few more years the name the politicians gave it would be forgotten.)
Fujita didn't pay the full price, but having him on board was like a free pass through customs. Friendly relations with authority were money in the bank for a new business. By the next trip she'd be able to afford better-forged identity papers.
The Aioya Inn staff, vacationing together, got the forecabin since they might be noisy. Misao, the girl who made the arrangements, was absurdly young and enthusiastic. She and the other women were pretty enough that the inn probably got good business, with two burly young men to keep an eye on the ruder customers, but the elderly owner was well into a second childhood. It was the only reason Shura didn't put a dagger in him when he groped her.
The government had closed many temples, dispossessing the monks and acolytes. The unworldly young man traveling with the Aioya party might hope for an adoption by marriage. Misao seemed to favor that plan.
The two tiny cabins amidship went to a small family of shopkeepers and a couple traveling to Tokyo to visit the wife's sister. The last passenger, a potter accompanying his shipment, put a hand on his sword (and how had he gotten that past the port inspectors?) and promised his assistance against hypothetical pirates. Shura had no fear of pirates at all, but she found herself agreeing. At least he didn't talk her into supplying his sake.
When Kenshin left them she and Uncle Iwa and Sarujiro had been penniless, homeless and, worst of all, shipless. In ports bustling with new, strange trade, two skilled sailors could find a series of short-term berths though. That Sarujiro was mute – and his 'older brother' not much more talkative – was no disadvantage for some employers. Iwa-jii kept accounts and traded some small things.
Shura did not intend that she and hers would serve the rest of their lives on another captain's ship. She'd known the resting place of a few wrecks. (Who better than the pirates who left them there?) Once they had a small fund collected, they floated decking from another boat to an intact hull, patched the sails from a third ship, carried the enging from a half-burnt hulk on an awkward raft.
A few times they could afford to hire help. More often they had to leave Iwa-jii to discourage salvagers while she and Sarujiro earned another installment of funds. When the Yasuo first rolled upright in the smooth swells beyond the surf, she'd been prouder of their work than she ever was coming home after a raid.
She had contacts now, names that might appreciate discrete transport. She couldn't resist showing off their gains to the red-headed swordsman and his friends She sent a letter to the woman's dojo, inviting them to meet her at the headland and finish the journey into Edo harbor.
The names of the tall fighter and the little boy slipped her mind. The letter just suggested that Kenshin bring his friends.
A day out from Kyoto, the girl from the Aoiya let slip who Goro was. Saito Hajime. The Wolf of Mibu. Now a police spy, trusted by the Meiji to bring down even his former compatriots. A swordsman whose motto was, Kill evil instantly.
She hoped briefly for coincidence. Perhaps with the rest of the world he supposed Shura the Pirate (abruptly fallen from sight a year or so past, and the ship's crew as well) a young man instead of a woman. He smiled the next time he saw her though. She felt a moment of rage that made her want to beat the smile from his face, and terror that kept her frozen.
He knew.
He didn't try to arrest her. Perhaps he enjoyed seeing the knowledge in her. Perhaps he was waiting for her response. She thought of steering out to sea and opening the cocks, or running the Yasuo into hull-ripping reefs. It would be a better end than the execution ground for her and hers. Let the landsman smile then!
The other passengers were innocent. She could not risk the Arai's little boy, or the sweet married couple who ran a beef pot restaurant, or even the staff of the Aioya as they busily tried to push together the owner's daughter and her shy suitor.
She knew the secret harbors of other pirates; she'd heard rumors of strange ships or smuggled weapons; and Western ships that went to odd ports. Perhaps she could trade information for -- not her own life; that was forfeit -- but the lives of her crew. Their only crime was loyalty to her. Surely the Wolf knew an old man and a mute boy were no threat to Meiji.
Fear wore out. Despair followed. She'd failed to lead in her father's place, failed to keep her crews on an honorable path, failed to feed the fishing villages that lived on the edge of hunger. She'd failed in her hope of living a respectable life, and she'd failed the two men who never wavered in loyalty to her.
Iwa and Sarujiro knew something was wrong, but she didn't speak. Alone in her bunk she looked at a folded kimono. She couldn't let herself cry even then.
When the Yasuo lodged on the gravel beach, Shura saw eleven people lined the embankment instead of the four she expected. It added nothing to her troubles. The Yasuo's draft was shallow, and the tide rising. She set planks out so the new passengers could come aboard without wetting their sandals . . . much.
Kaoru walked up lambasting Kenshin for the mud on the hem of her festival kimono, and Yahiko for jeering. A tall beauty hinted that Kenshin should carry her, as he blinked and muttered, "Oro?" The fighter Sanosuke volunteered. He tripped and landed flat in the mud. The woman minced across him.
After her came an old man and two little girls, a pale man who smiled at Sanosuke and scribbled notes, and a businesswoman mirroring the woman who went to meet her sister. Lastly Yahiko gave a hand to a stumbling, blushing girl.
Kenshin froze with a hand on his sword. Goro leaned across the railing by the pilothouse.
"You!" Kaoru screeched up at him. "What are you doing here? Forget about it! Kenshin's not working for you ever again!"
Shura, who'd paid more attention to the swordsman than his companions, felt her jaw drop. Was the girl insane, or just insanely brave? Goro smiled.
"If he's needed, that won't be your decision, tanuki-girl." He looked down at Shura. "What's the delay? I have an appointment at the customs house."
"Maa, maa. We should all be less serious on a day of relaxation, that we should,"
Kenshin shrank almost visibly from a warrior to a hobo, and continued onto the deck. Kaoru, the boy, the tall fighter, and the beauty followed him.
"Soon, lord. The wind is with us," Shura told Goro, as humble as if Shura and the Kairyu pirates never existed, "It will be a three hour journey."
They were still so near the coast that they could see pale aisles of cherry flowers, when the wind died and fog came up about them. The Yasuo lurched like a netted fish, and a light like torches made even sunlight unsure.
It reflected yellowly from Kenshin's odd lavender eyes. He dropped into a swordsman's crouch, his hand on the sword hilt. Sanosuke cracked the knuckles of his bandaged hand. Kaoru raised a wooden sword and Yahiko a bamboo one, as if those weapons would be any use.
Goro's sword was already drawn. He stood on the upper deck, his back to Kenshin. Below him on the deck, his shock-headed servant squinted at the fog.
"Go to your cabins," Shura told the passengers, not trying to disguise a captain's command.
She let the nunchuks drop from the sleeve of her kimono. She might not understand why or how, but her instincts agreed with those of the other fighters. Threat was near.
Only Kenshin was looking up though, when something huge and bright and quick as a dragon stooped upon them.
All in all, those in power found the disappearance a relief. No politician could trust a man whose motto was, Slay Evil Instantly, and the former Battousai, however useful in an emergency, had been a loose cannon with no rein of self-interest. That they'd taken with them a writer of criminal broadsheets and the surviving Kyoto onmitsu only gilded the sweet. As for further plots against Tokyo or the Meiji government, well, that was what the clan of assassins was for. Although it was disconcerting to deliver black envelopes to a cherry tree . . . .