金繕い - kintsukuroi (n.) (v. phr.) "to repair with gold"; the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken
Kaoru settles into the dirt, packed hard from the many times others have knelt or walked between the graves. It's still damp from yesterday's light rain—just wet enough that she feels it through the double folds of the fabric over her knees. I'll have to wash this kimono as soon as I get home, she thinks, rather distantly, as she lays the white flowers before the grave.
It's the first time Kaoru's visited Tomoe's grave without Kenshin, and it feels like a breach of ritual. It is always Kenshin's job to take the lead: a silent prayer, a spoken gratitude, a flower laid on the earth before goodbye. Sometimes Kaoru joins him, and sometimes she stays back at the Aoiya with Misao, but always it is a silent conversation that Kaoru knows she can never join. Now, without him, Kaoru curls her fingers into the fabric of kimono bunched at her knees. She's alone in the graveyard, but she feels a spotlight of a kind she hasn't felt since she first began teaching in the dojo years ago. Kaoru is not a shy girl; but facing nothing but a name carved on the grey stone before her she is, for the moment, lost for words.
"Hi," she says, finally, then winces twice—once, because that's her blurted greeting, then again, because she's talking to a grave.
It feels better, though, to talk aloud. Kaoru checks to make sure she's alone, then takes a deep breath and continues to speak to the mound of packed, damp earth in front of her. "He doesn't know I'm here. Well, I'm sure he's guessed it, even if I just said I wanted to visit Misao-chan. It's just, I told him I didn't want him to join me in bringing the news, which wouldn't really make a lot of sense, except I thought I wanted you to hear it from me."
She twists her hands more tightly in the kimono at her thighs, then wriggles a little to resettle her position. Then—"We're getting married."
There—the bombshell, dropped before she can bite it back. Not that any Tomoe, watching over Kenshin even in death, wouldn't already know, but somehow Kaoru feels that it had to be said.
(It was barely said at all, even between them—a dream, sweating and gasping in the night; a hold, a silent shudder; a sudden,"Let's start a new family," and a kiss that had sealed the promise.)
"Thank you for sending him to me," Kaoru whispers, and she's surprised to feel a burning in her eyes, daring to spill down her cheeks even when she squeezes her eyes shut to hold them back—it tumbles over without her permission. She thinks of a woman, lonely and heartbroken who pulled a madman out of the depths. She thinks of a woman, clad in white and staining the snow red as she smiles up at the man above her. Tomoe is painted for Kaoru in the low tones of Kenshin's voice, in the shrieks and terror of Enishi's trauma, and she is a canvas of spattered blacks and reds.
"Thank you for forgiving him," Kaoru continues, and this time her voice breaks. This time she gives in to the tears, the red in her eyes and the blotches in her cheeks. "Thank you for loving him. And thank you for saving him."
She unclenches her hands, shaking now, from her wrinkled kimono and links them together instead. A vow to protect that happy life. For a moment Kaoru sees Kenshin in the red-stained snow of that day instead—it isn't hard to picture, not after the many times she's seen him smiling at her even at the door of his own death. And she understands what Kenshin sees every time he fights: a fading smile, a fading breath, a life he never wants to live again. He could have died, that day in the snow. But "You saw the good in him, and you let him save my life instead."
Kaoru never stops to wonder what her life would have been if Kenshin had never wandered into it. She knows. Her father's dojo, lost; Yahiko, thieving on the streets until his gang beat him, for all his samurai pride; Sanosuke, fighting for his anger but never at peace with the death of the man he called captain; Megumi, killed by her own hand for her crimes. Instead, they are a family, and it was Kenshin who made them whole.
Kaoru slides her hands forwards, dragging them through the dirt, touching her forehead to the diamond she makes on the earth with her fingers. "I love him," she says, desperate for Tomoe to understand this—that Tomoe showed him a life that Kenshin had never known he could have, that Kenshin lived on her memory to give that to others, that Kaoru could not be loving him now if he had not loved before.
She doesn't know how long she stays there, crouched in the dirt with her head bent to small grey stone of the stele. But she stays until her shoulders stop shaking, and she straightens and wipes mud-streaked hands over her eyes. For one wild moment, her eyes closed to shut out the dirt and tears, she thinks she sees a shrug of a purple-shrouded shoulder, a silent smile; but when Kaoru stands, all she sees when she looks down on the tiny mound is the flowers she brought already wilting against the dampened earth.