Halloween theme tiems! Writing challenge for myself: 5k words (keep it tight), in and out story, use a horror trope. (Anyone else that wants in on this silliness, you're welcome to it!) Enishi as a vampire would be just too sexy, my head would explode, had to go a different way. This was all from thinking, what if the real victim on the island had been Enishi? Spooky doom!
Disclaimer: I don't own Rurouni Kenshin, obvs
Two centuries into what Kaoru assumed was going be a very long existence and the only real truth she had come away with was that near immortality seemed a lot more attractive at 17 when you thought you wouldn't live to see 30. She would have laughed into the face of that pale jiangshi traveling through her village if she had understood what he had really asked her (to this day she was certain the only reason things had turned out this way was due to a complex communication issue). If only she had been a little older, or had a little grey shot through her long black hair, maybe life would have been easier. The early years had been brutal, and her movement to the outlands and up the coastline best forgotten if she wanted to retain any shred of humanity.
"Kaoru, I'm off to see Tsubame, anything you need on my way back?" Yahiko peeked into the kitchen to eye her cooking and she could see that he fully expected everything to look a disaster. She had answered his expectations with chopped bits of things in various spots and the soup she thought she was working on bubbling away on too high heat.
"Pick up some fresh vegetables, something you want Kenshin to fix tonight." Kaoru looked at the mess around her and suppressed the urge to swear. Sometimes she would just space out and five minutes turned out to be fifteen or forty. Those episodes had been happening more and more the past decade and it was ruinous to her attempts at learning cooking. So many burnt dinners!
Yahiko, realizing whatever Kaoru was working on wasn't something he'd have to choke down later, got very enthusiastic about shopping. He'd probably just come home with meat, his favorite, but she hoped for his sake he would pick up vegetables. Meat reminded her too much of blood and she'd been so disciplined these past few years that the hunger she felt was easier to resist than ever before except on those nights they had fresh meat.
She had gone too soft and she was making mistakes. Sunlight didn't do anything to her other than give her a pervasive headache, as if it marked the passage of time the way her body no longer accepted. Vinegar, rice, and fire all did nothing which was a good thing otherwise seeming normal would have been excessively difficult. A steak to the heart would probably kill her, she was very protective of her chest and the jiangshi had warned her of that one. Oddly enough azuki did make her violently ill, and mirrors she couldn't abide, but the mirror problem was purely in her own head. It was easy to pretend that her dislike of mirrors was a result of teenage vanity, when really it was a pervasive disgust that she could not detect any change in herself. Denying herself blood had made her almost as weak as a regular person, and maybe there was an edge of longing prompting that. If she stayed away from blood long enough, would she be normal again? Would she age and die? To be a regular person…
The sound of swordplay shocked her out of her routine, shouts and what might as well be an explosion had her abandoning her soup and running to find Kenshin. Life since she had taken in the rurouni had been very complex, full of vitality and drama on a scale she hadn't anticipated but didn't precisely despise after so many years nearly alone. When the man she had hired to be her father in this generation had passed away unexpectedly, she had thought to become reclusive but it wasn't to be.
As Enishi made his way towards her she thought that come what may, she did not regret the human connections she had forged. Her stomach churned as Kenshin beat Enishi badly in front of her, blood spattering everywhere. The expression she wore was the agony of longing instead of worry and she fought herself as Kenshin fought Enishi. When Kujiranami came out of nowhere Kaoru prayed that she be struck unconscious before she rushed Enishi and showed them all that the most fearful monster in this battle was trembling mere feet from it.
The soup was well and truly burned when Enishi came for her through a smoke screen, swiftly knocking her out, and she hated herself all the more for allowing herself to get too weak as he hauled her away like a sack of rice and everything faded to black. Kenshin and Yahiko would be worried sick, but not once did she fear Enishi or her own death. If Enishi had offered to kill her it might have been a mercy, but he angled for Kenshin's suffering, not her own.
Enishi could not place it, but the Kamiya girl was off somehow. She would wander the island villa and sigh, looking out at the trees that formed a barrier to the ocean, as expected. She would rifle through his books and ocean maps in the small library and examine the kanji closely, sounding out the occasional word, also as expected. At some point she discovered his kitchen and began to irregularly cook them both meals, delivering them to him with a friendly smile which, while not expected, was easily explainable as her trying to ingratiate herself to him. It was the things that he couldn't piece together that bothered him.
As the Chinese saying ran, near to rivers, we recognize fish, near to mountains, we recognize the songs of birds, and if understanding exactly what was contained in one's environment was important then he needed to be honest about the fact that Kamiya was uncanny. She didn't fit. He had checked on her one sleepless night and while she looked perfectly reposed, her body did not visibly rise and fall with breath. Of all the emotions she had expressed upon her arrival here, none of them included fear. The syndicate members she had encountered who had leered at her and towered over her when they thought Enishi hadn't seen them were regarded with haughty annoyance. The simple robe he had given her to demoralize and embarrass her didn't seem to offend her modesty in any fashion, even though spies had reported the girl was covered head to toe every time she ventured from her dojo. No, she was not falling into the patterns he had predicted for her, and for Enishi to be wrong about someone so outwardly simple was giving him room to doubt himself. Had he spent too long in his ravings, and was the insanity that hardened his nerves finally touching the parts of his mind that made him functional?
Kamiya had taken an interest in the oldest manuscripts in his library, and she would curl up onto the western style chair and run her fingers over the lines. At first she appeared to just be looking at them, but sometimes she would flip back as if to reference something and Enishi was certain she was actually reading not just looking for similar kanji and deriving basic meaning.
"You know Chinese?" He approached her at last when he realized stalking her was not enticing her to interact.
Her eyes wandered to his bandages. Some of them needed changing, he thought, and she was probably noting his still battered state. If she thought it was an invitation to make her escape he'd have to show her he was still strong. Drawing closer to her, he tried to project menace towards the curled up girl.
"I can pick out a word or two; my father enjoyed classical poetry." Her eyes were blue as the sea and twice as inscrutable. The tension in her small frame pleased him, let him know she was aware of him as a threat, but the slight smile on her face was still there.
"I bought it because it was expensive and rare, not for you to enjoy it." The implication was that she should return it to the shelf, but he honestly didn't care what she wanted he just waited to see how she would react to his continued presence.
The tension in her frame hadn't lessened but she sounded casual enough as she inclined her head to him and responded. "Then tell me which ones you don't care about and I'll read those."
"What if I care about all of them?" He wanted to take things from her, but only because her smile hadn't left her face. It was when he noticed the bead of red where she had bitten through her lip that he was satisfied. Maybe she was fighting her fear, Enishi could respect that so long as she did fear him. He needed that control. The shuddering breath she gave as he turned and left her without waiting for her response was infinitely satisfying.
Kaoru had to find something new to do to stay away from Enishi.
The seeping wounds that he was barely allowing to heal were a major source of trouble for her. Every day she took him a meal she tested herself to see if the smell of blood were receding from him, or if she wanted to taste it less. Since he refused to stop training he was healing slowly, and Kaoru was in what could only be described as a protracted state of hunger because of it. Her cooking was getting clumsier and her attention to her appearance beginning to slide as she smelled and tasted Enishi in every room. The musty library dampened things a little as she puzzled out meaning to forgotten words. A peasant didn't have much use for reading and writing, but she had taught herself over the years. It had been almost a century since she had spoken Chinese or attempted to read anything other than the Japanese pronunciations of the common kanji.
Enishi reminded her of the beast below her skin.
The imperial orders in China two hundred years ago had displaced the sea communities and forced so much movement, no one noticed when a sailor or a fisherman was lost at sea only to wash up on shore much later, or if a lone girl who lost her family needed a place to live for a time. That the two would be connected was impossible to think about. The bloodless nature of the corpse could be attributed to what the sea and salt and life in the ocean could to do a body, but Kaoru knew you could only have one or two of those incidents in a few months before it started to seem suspicious. When people began to ask her deeper questions about why she had landed at one village, as opposed to another, she worried that they would find the trail of bodies leading ever northward. The chaos of those days protected her, and she was lucky she had not been found out.
Traveling as a young girl was troublesome, but bandits posed no real problem and served as a convenient meal on the road until one day she followed a survivor back to his poor village. The small group of desperately hungry people didn't even attempt to fight the monster with the blood dried on her face, they simply lit their huts on fire in an attempt to ward her off and ran. Until that day Kaoru had told herself she was only doing what was necessary to survive. It was hard to make the same argument when you were surrounded by a burning village. More people probably died in the fires that day than ever would have at her hand, it was tragic and senseless. At some point you have to make a change.
Enishi, in his rage and his grief, took her back to that burning village in her heart. At night his keening cries for his sister made her ache, and during the day the rusty smell of his blood made her want. Ignoring him was becoming impossible in the small house with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
The Kamiya girl was finally starting to crumble. Her food had gone from bad to almost inedible, and at some point she stopped bringing it to him entirely. The gentleness with which she used to do things had gone and he heard her stomping through the house as if in a temper all the time. If she thought she could simply irritate him into letting her go she would find out he had infinitely more patience for the nonsense of a teenage girl than either of them expected. He only worried once when he found her looking somewhat crumpled on the railing of the porch that overlooked the front of the villa, hair greasy and lank, robe stained and gaping in front, and her pale skin burning in the sun.
He hadn't wanted the Kamiya girl's death, it did not serve his purpose or please the mental projection of his sister, but as he approached her one pale sweating hand had flown up to halt his progression.
"Don't," her voice cracked, full of a horror he couldn't comprehend and she tried to gather herself together. Shaking hands tried to redo her robe, but he got an eyeful of smooth skin and toned muscles. Reminding himself to see her as a tool and not a woman, he struggled with what to say next.
"Kamiya if you are sick, medicine can be provided. Laying out here serves no purpose." If it was despair eating her heart he could empathize with that. Sudden impulse led him to share with her. "Your friends have discovered the corpse I left with them was Gein's construction. They will arrive at the island before the week is out."
Her laugh fragmented into the wind. "I can't hold out much longer…"
"Pull yourself together Kamiya, if you die on my banister I promise you I'll throw your corpse in the sea and never think on you again." He said it with disgust, hoping his disrespectful handling of her corpse would get a rise from her. Truthfully, she was filling him with alarm, reminding him of another woman in his life who wasted away from her own inner turmoil.
Not listening to her keening protests he picked her up and carried her through the house to the bathroom. Every step of the way he could feel her stiff limbs fight him, but in his mind it was his sister he carried as he brought her to the bathroom. As the modern bathtub filled slowly with lukewarm water Enishi was almost in a trance as he smoothed down her hair and began to massage soap into it.
"You have to go, you have to," she begged, and he felt himself withdraw unconsciously only to come to later in his own room with his sister's journal clutched to his heart and the disturbing memory of the feel of Kamiya's skin under his hands.
After that day she was a ghost in his home.
She had sworn to protect life. The core of the last century and a half for her had been that no matter what, human life was meant to be cherished. If she had enough room in her heart for those that valued it then there was no way she had lost all of her humanity. That, in any case, was what she told herself. People came and went, wars came and went, and Kaoru did what little bits of good were available to her. Sword fighting was a more recent hobby, first a manner of defense, and now a convenient pretense to continue to live in a dojo that had no students save one boy she couldn't turn back out to a cruel world. The rurouni had a special place in her heart because she understood him, had been him, but Enishi drew her in with temptations she never thought she could feel so strongly. His jinchuu could have just as easily come for her, he should have been the hand of justice that ended her cursed life. The jealousy she felt that Kenshin could confront his deeds in the form of a person and make amends seared what was left of her soul.
Kaoru didn't deserve the peace she'd won. Hundreds of sons like Enishi had lived without their precious people because of her carelessness, no matter how reformed she was. At her heart she was a demon, and she wished Enishi had come for her. Sometimes she was so confused she thought maybe she desired Enishi instead of what he stood for, and she was so close to the tipping point that it almost didn't matter.
Silently dressing in the kimono he had left for her, she braced herself for what she knew would be the ultimate test. Today Kenshin and all her friends came to save her, and she would see if there was anything left of her they could save.
It took some creativity to break out of her room, having gone so long without food of any kind she was forced to wrap her arm in a blanket and break the window before dropping from it as gracefully as one could in tight clothing. She took the time to retie her outer layer and obi before making the long slow journey to the beach. The sun was as merciless as ever, confusing her mind with pain.
As Kaoru appeared on the beach she saw Enishi and Kenshin already involved. Enishi was shouting, Kenshin looked shrewd and determined. It didn't matter what they said or did once the blood started misting the air. Kaoru felt her legs start on their own, each step slow and ponderous, as she moved towards the core of the battle. Her friends called to her to come to them but she had already lost; they sounded so far away.
Coming between Kenshin and Enishi, they continued to exchange words about their past that she barely heard, but as the traitorous Heishin leapt out of the underbrush to end Enishi's life with something as mundane as a bullet after all this Kaoru realized here was her chance to serve the greater good. Imagine her surprise when Enishi, with movements faster than she could even track, neatly pivoted himself in the way of her sacrifice. The bullet didn't find her still heart, but she did feel Enishi slump against her as the impact of the bullet rocked his body.
They went down together, his arms wrapped around her so tightly she almost felt like she had a heartbeat again. He was so strong and vital, every hard muscle and corded nerve reminding her of her purpose, and as she smelled the scent of his blood around her she gave a soft sigh and bit down into his neck. If someone went after Heishin she didn't know, and was beyond caring, all Kaoru knew was the hot metallic taste of his blood as she was filled with Enishi's strength.
She would have drained him on that beach when Kenshin's hand on her shoulder brought her away from her task with a hiss. Dilated pupils let in too much light and she only caught the barest glimpse of his shock and disgust. It didn't surprise her, she couldn't blame him, she was just as disgusted with herself.
Kaoru's elongated canines hadn't even had a chance to retract as she spun towards her friends, looking like the monster she'd always feared she'd become. Tears beat tracks down her bloody face as she begged them not to look at her. Yahiko she couldn't even look at, to see his face twisted in revulsion would break her more completely than any of the others.
"Leave me here," she reached out to Kenshin who flinched, then immediately looked sorrowful.
"Kaoru-dono…"
"I can't go back right now." She looked back at Enishi who was breathing shallowly behind her, slumped on the sand and oozing blood from his neck besides a dozen other injuries. Grimly, she accepted the course of action she had begun in her own mind before looking back at Kenshin. Someone, maybe Misao, gave a sob in the background. At her worst, her secret laid bare before the people closest to her, Kaoru felt more human and more vulnerable than ever before. The sluggish pumping of Enishi's blood through her system felt so horribly right that even when she picked him up like a rag doll with inhuman strength, and walked back towards the villa Kaoru could only feel the eerie peace that always followed feeding rather than the whispered regrets that would follow in the coming days.
Back to the bathroom that he had bathed her in less than a week ago, Kaoru set Enishi in the empty bathtub and tore open her wrist. Her teeth had receded back into her jaw in that uncomfortable bone crunching way that they had, rearranging her teeth the whole way, so she used Enishi's shaving razor. It was sharper even than his sword and she barely felt any pain as her thick dark blood oozed through the cut.
He was hardly breathing, and she wasn't even sure this would work, but she would never forget the night she was reborn as it had been a situation very similar. Gravely wounded, confused, searching. But the foreign man had asked her the question and she wasn't sure Enishi had enough mental faculties to understand what she was or what he would become, so she selfishly poured her blood down his throat. Once she was reasonably sure she couldn't lose much more blood and be strong enough to survive the next few days, she grabbed gauze from the cupboard next to the sink and sat down on the flush toilet to wait as she bandaged her arm. It would heal quickly, but she had sliced deeply and blood was a commodity.
At first she thought she had drunk too deeply or gotten to him too late, but she watched with grim satisfaction as his wounds began to fold in on themselves. Muscle and tendon reconnected and discolored before it was covered by skin which bruised then faded to normal. He'd find it was difficult to maintain that healthy tan skin of his, but for now he looked healthy. The bullet might be in there a while longer, but there was a possibility his new body would spit it out for him. Kaoru wasn't sure, having never been shot.
Enishi's labored breathing hitched, then silenced. It was just a matter of time now, and she waited with the patience she had cultivated over the centuries. Hesitantly she reached over and stroked his hair, finding it softer than she'd expected. He looked the part of a demon when alive, she couldn't imagine how destructive and powerful he'd be when he was... whatever she was.
Kaoru's vigil continued as she waited for redemption, because Enishi was her justice. Whether he chose to destroy her like he planned with Kenshin or bond to her like his did to his sister, today she would revel in the fact that, despite alienating everyone she loved, for the first time in two hundred years she would no longer be alone.