Note: Though this happens after, it was written before Quiet Life II. ;) It´s two chapters long (again) and focuses on Kenshin´s problems. About the timeline, it´s supposed to happen almost three years after the other (the corresponding season is summer). Thanks to all who reviewed the other story.

Disclaimer: Kenshin and Tomoe belong to Watsuki.

Special thanks to Margit and Aaerdan.

Quiet Life II: Summer days (1876)

I: Nightmares

Night had fallen long ago, heavy and without moon, as he found himself walking the streets of Kyoto. A distinct smell of fresh blood came from the alley he had just left like a silent shadow, ready to melt with the other shadows and to disappear in the darkness´s secure embrace like one more of her creatures. He turned on his heels, instinctively wiping the inexistent red stains from his hands…

…and suddenly felt the light touch of a presence behind his back.

Damn. he cursed to himself, after the fraction of second that he needed to process the information. He had been followed. They were behind him.

My sword!, he thought frantically, his hands fumbling with his obi in search of a weapon. He couldn´t believe this was happening to him. That carelessness was unheard of, he had always been able to perceive people long before they started to threaten him with their proximity! This hadn´t ever happened to him. Surely it couldn´t be…

The presence became more evident behind him now, silent and breathing in his back. It seemed suspiciously that it was enjoying his discomfort too much to press the advantage, as if it was sure that he had no chance. His sword… If he only had his sword…

But, he found in that precise moment to his horror, no one of his swords were in their place.

I am dead. Realization came upon him slowly, but steadily. He did not know how they could have disappeared all of a sudden, but who cared, confronted with the glaring fact? Words, that had been spoken to him long ago, started to resurface now in his mind, mocking him with their undeniable truth.

"Once  they have got behind you…"

"Bare handed you´re a real disaster, baka deshi!"

"Start to say your prayers…"

Still, he thought then, to run with his back unguarded, and a presence behind him who, apparently, did not waver at all, did not appeal to his common sense either. Maybe his unknown enemy was just expecting him to run in order to launch his attack.

Or maybe…

With the strength of mind of dire desperation, Kenshin quickly devised some semblance of a last plan. He would mask his ki, and then turn back slowly, as if he was frightened, dazed or wanted to surrender. If he could make his enemy gain confidence and lower his guard, he might be a real disaster bare-handed and all, but at least he would be able to place a kick well with his Hiten Mitsurugi godlike speed.

"Kenshin…." a voice called him from behind. His head fully set for his plan, however, he paid no attention to the anxious tone, or to the words …or to the fact that it was a voice he had heard plenty of times before now. Keeping his breath, he turned back in a rush….

"Shinta, please, stop!"

And his eyes were opened wide at the mention of that name by the woman who was breathing heavily in his grasp.

"Tomoe!" he cried out, astonished. As he was trying to recover his senses, a bright and warm light irrupted in the sinister scenario, and the pair of hazel eyes that he had seen before were set on him again, filled with concern and worry. He felt himself falling, falling deeply into an abyss of sunlight, until he was back on his disheveled futon, with the woman he loved firmly pinned under his body. "I´m sorry…"he muttered, still dazed and embracing her. "I´m so sorry. I was…"

"Shhh", Tomoe cut his apologies. Before she could even add something else, his desperate embrace left her without breath, and she had to concentrate her efforts not to suffocate.

"If I had had my sword I might have killed you", he stammered several times, in broken realization. "Even now…"

"My love…" When the pressure became somewhat less strong, her hands softly made their way to his shoulders, and she even forced herself to smile in the middle of a gasp. "Oh, my love. Even now… what? You… you  don´t sleep with your sword anymore… since many years ago. That´s a great difference."

"Not enough", he muttered despondently. "Never enough."

"I´m sure it´s enough to matter. But, my dear… the dream you were having, may I ... could I share it with you now?"

As Tomoe had imagined that would happen, her husband shook his head determinedly. He never told her what he had dreamed about, and this, on the one hand, was completely unnecessary, since she could imagine the subject of his nightmares well enough, and the intensity, the horror, was something she wouldn´t understand even if he tried to tell her. But, on the other, she would wish that he gave in even once, and shared his pain with someone just for the sake of it. Once she had ceased feeling the need for revenge, fear had taken its place, and indecision, and many other reasons that had forced her to stay quiet and hidden, but the only reason he had to hide his own things now was a keen urge to shelter her, and that she couldn´t stand.

She has enough problems already, he was thinking meanwhile, swallowing down his need to flee from the bed and do something, anything, to forget what he had just experienced. It wouldn´t be proper to leave her alone now, he had to force himself to lie back and press her head to his chest. After all... what was new? Hadn´t he had nightmares before, and plenty of times, even so many years after the Bakumatsu?

Suddenly, though, as he was thinking in this strain, a sudden shift of a presence disturbed him once more, and made him open his eyes wide. Tomoe threw him a puzzled look almost at once, but, as soon as he realized what it was, he relaxed and calmed her with his touch.

Someone has just made his way to the hole behind the screen, he said to himself with a grin, feeling his troubles somehow dissipate in the wind as if under the effect of magic.

"I do n…" Tomoe started, even more puzzled than before. "What..?"

"Miyoko-chan," he whispered in her ear. To his amusement, his wife´s face was flushed instantly, and she couldn´t suppress her anger.

"Miyoko!!!" she cried, sitting up once more on the futon and pushing the covers down. "I know that you´re there!"

"She has just arrived," Kenshin was careful to clarify before the thing could get worse. "She´s extremely easy to sense."

Admitting her defeat, their daughter appeared at that moment from behind the screen, the guilty look in her face not enough to suppress the delighted smile that was dancing on her lips. Yes, it was evident that she had just been in time to catch their fondling… once more.

"S… sorry. I was just trying to..." she started, fidgeting with her hands. Tomoe´s eye twitched.

"You´re far too clever, Miyoko-chan," she grumbled, struggling to her feet. "But now, come on! You´d better cease adventuring and get dressed soon, for we´re going to leave early today. We have to accompany your father to visit Matsuo-san."

"Really?" Miyoko´s smile widened almost at once, and it was with a jump that she left their presence. She loved to go out and visit people, especially if there were children, and Matsuo-san had two daughters that were slightly older than she. Kenshin remembered very well the happiness, the life that glowed in her face whenever she played with them.

"Nosy little imp…" his wife kept grumbling as she put her shawl on to leave so that he could change. Kenshin smiled once more, this time a conciliating smile while he unfolded his kimono on top of their bed.

"Well, I think I´d better go now and prepare something quick for breakfast," she announced, collecting her things. "Oh, and, by the way, "she added before disappearing behind the screen. "I´m glad to see you´re… feeling better."

Though it was evident that the sign was lost, the red haired man pressed his lips together, and nodded fervently.

*     *     *     *     *

"Ten minutes, all right?"

As Kenshin took the cooking pot under his supervision, and saw his wife walk quickly behind the screen he had just emerged from in order to change in turn, he wondered what exactly had happened while he was still behind it to make such a calm lady so stressed. The fire had been clumsily ignited, the rice had a bit too much water, and Miyoko was sitting on the floor with a somewhat sorry expression.

"We could not find my left tabi," she explained with a forlorn voice. "I tossed it too high last night…and we were searching for it until Mother started to take the rice out from the bag."

"And where was it?" he asked distractedly, trying to decide at the same time whether to add more rice to it or to throw off a bit of the water. In the end, he opted for the first, noticing that it was too small a quantity to begin with.

"In the rice bag," she answered, just when he had introduced his hand in it. As he instinctively let the grains he had caught slide between his fingers, she gave a deep contrite sigh, and shrugged her nose.

"I… I can wash it, if you want."

II: Medical visits.

It was a wonderful day, Kenshin couldn´t help but think, once more, as he turned a furtive glance at the cloudless blue sky above his head. Birds were singing in the branches of each tree, the sounds of people´s voices entwined with them when the breeze carried them from the distance, and the air was as warm as it rarely could be in such a usually cold place. Behind him, at a short distance, his wife and his daughter were also forgetting everything to look in the same direction as he, enchanted with the mood of the day, and Miyoko even got so distracted for a moment that her doll escaped her grip and fell some meters down the slope. Kenshin slowed his pace instinctively as soon as he noticed it, in order to avoid tensions.

"Give me your hand, and let´s hurry," Tomoe admonished the girl in a whisper once she had successfully fished her doll back. "And don´t let the doll go. We´re slowing your father down!"

"I´m in time," he reassured them, falling once more in his normal stride. No answer came to him, except a tiny girlish whisper that he wasn´t able to decipher very well. Then, silence and quiet reigned again in their small group, until at last their steps took them to the main and practically only street of the small village, and to the people who were walking there.

 "Good morning, Himura-san!" a group of men who went to work at the fields greeted him. "Goin´to work early, aren't you?"

"You know that Matsuo-san had an ugly thorn deeply imbedded in his foot yesterday", he explained briefly, after answering their greeting with a bow. "I have to see how the wound is progressing."

"The wound? Sheesh." One of the men turned to the others, and began to give them some kind of explanation that involved a continuous use of his hands. "It was a little prick at first, I was there when he gave the yell. He said it was alright, but then it began to swell, and swell, and swell. When we brought him back home, Yomo-san almost killed us…!"

"I think he´s better this morning", a third one remarked, scratching his chin. "Didn´t hear weird yells in the middle of the night. Anyway, tell him that we asked you about him, okay?"

"Okay, I will" Kenshin nodded seriously, then bade them goodbye while suppressing a smile. He felt better with them at each passing day, almost to an extent that he was starting to forget how painful it had been at first to be surrounded by peaceful and innocent people to whom, in a way, he was lying. Right now, though he couldn´t say he was one of them, and both his wife and himself looked too weird and aloof for those people to socialise with too often, he knew that his hard work had convinced them long ago that he was someone they could trust, and who would help them freely and without second intentions. He had been working with them, not only healing their wounds and their colds, but also accompanying them in any imaginable job, since more often than not his money was too scarce for surviving. Several years ago, he had even participated in hunts and killed wolves, and even though there they had seen him doing some things that he shouldn´t have done in front of them, they had been already too convinced of his good intentions to have any misgivings about him.

Oh, yes, blissful ignorance, he mused with a sad chuckle. Sometimes he had to confess that, beyond guilt and repentance, it was simply liberating, if in a selfish way, that not everybody in Japan thought him a monster. Even if this implied that he was surrounded by people who hadn´t heard about him at all.

 "Good morning, Himura Shinta-san!" Matsuo-san´s wife cried, as soon as she opened the shoji enough to see who was there. "Come in, come in! We were expecting you…"

"We did not arrive too late, I hope…" Kenshin mumbled awkwardly. The woman then seemed to realize the implication of her innocent words, and shook her head with fervour.

"Oh, no, no! It wasn´t that what I meant. I… well, come in. Oh, you have brought your daughter!"

"Good morning, Yomo-san." Miyoko greeted her politely, while bracing herself for the inevitable torture of the admiring hair pulling and face pinching. In spite of her occasional spying on them, and her custom of tossing her tabi in the most inconvenient places, in moments like that one Kenshin could not help thinking that there was no doubt that the girl was an angel. There was no way in Earth he would have submitted to that, and his level of tolerance was already high  enough.

"Is your husband all right?" he asked, at last getting inside with Tomoe and Miyoko at his heels. Yomo nodded with joy.

"We are everlastingly grateful to you, Himura-san. The swelling has almost disappeared by now."

Though he seldom showed his emotions in front of other people by pure instinct, this time Kenshin could not help but sigh of relief. Tomoe perceived his happiness, and thought that so many years of practice hadn´t yet made their effect in her overly scrupulous husband. Still afraid of being overpowered by the circumstances and to fail the whole world… no matter what happened to him, he would never change in that.

"Well…we´ll see, then," he said, motioning her to follow and watching for a fraction of a second how his daughter left with her friends among giggles and laughs.

*     *     *     *     *

As Kenshin checked the state of the wound he had previously inflicted in order to take the thorn and the excretion away, he was very satisfied of seeing that Yomo hadn´t been wrong, and that everything was really, truly, going well. Maybe Tomoe had been right, after all, when she had told him that after several years of practice he had become better and should cease feeling so worried. He still cringed at the remembrance of that family who had died after eating a poisonous plant two years ago, and who, he was convinced, would have survived if he had known what to do, but, alas! he should know better already, and his experience should tell him enough about how damn difficult it was to save people in real, earthly life. Who had the legendary hitokiri Battousai saved, in fact, after four years of continuous slaughter?

An abstraction. He had saved an abstraction, he answered himself abruptly  while he turned the man´s leg over with care. The abstraction his mind had created to conceal the –human!- faces of all those people who had died. And oh, how pitifully incapable he knew that he would be of solving even one millionth of the problems he had created while trying to solve it! He just had to think of Tomoe, his own wife, whom he could make to tell him all the things that crossed her mind except for one. He loved her, and she loved him, but that different, deeper sadness would always be there, making him blame himself for having caused it and for being unable to help now.

And then, there´s also those nightmares…

"Do you mind if I tell you how lucky you are with that daughter of yours?" the gruff voice of the injured man killed his musings. At once, Kenshin struggled to change his thoughts and his countenance, berating himself for having got distracted in the first place. How could even satisfaction turn so soon into shame? "She´s a real beauty."

"She takes after her mother," he answered, managing a smile. As he saw how Matsuo started immediately to argue, though, politely listing all the points in which she was the spitting image of his father, that smile soon turned into a real one. "Well, maybe after both."

For example, he thought, since he wouldn´t ever have said it aloud, she will be shorter than her mother…

"If I were you, I´d be marrying her off soon," the man continued, with that sympathetic glance that was customary of men when advising a poor young father who had never had children before. "Suitors will start arriving to your house daily, and they´re a true pest."

"Are there so many young men here?" Kenshin asked, somewhat amused. "Or do you mean that the same one will be coming back every day?"

The man couldn´t help but laugh at this, as gruffly as he spoke, and holding his side.

"Well, if it´s the same one, he´d better be decent!"

"Don´t worry about that, Matsuo-san; she´s too young to have such problems still. As for now…" Kenshin got up, and washed his hands in a bowl. "I´m going to get clean bandages to put them on your foot. Wait for me here, all right?"

"No, I think I prefer to climb up that mountain over there, running." Matsuo snapped back ironically. Kenshin shook his head with vehemence before turning away.

Sense of humour indeed, he muttered to himself, closing the shoji behind his back. As he walked towards the kitchen, he had to use his extremely trained and quick reflexes to avoid being overrun by Matsuo´s daughters, who were running towards the door with a ball on their hands. For a moment, he thought he could hear a raspy voice shouting at them from the kitchen, but once he entered there he found all the women silently bending over the small table where Tomoe sat.

"Kieiko-san, Yomo-san, Mayo-san," he said, bowing in polite greeting to Matsuo´s mother, his wife and his eldest, recently betrothed daughter. As usual, they were all watching fascinated how Tomoe wrote their names with the writing tools she had brought, and she was there in the centre of the group, working with sure and neat movements and obviously enjoying every ounce of their attention. When she spotted him, though, she stopped for a moment, and lifted his head to meet his eyes with an inquiring expression.

"I need bandages," he said.

Tomoe made an attempt to get up, immediately thwarted by Mayo, who went before her. Still, she got up nonetheless, and walked towards him while Yomo discussed the written symbols with her mother-in-law.

"Yomo-san told me that her husband is planning to invite us to stay longer in order to thank you," she said, putting her hair back into place. "She´s going to cook for us, too."

"I don´t want to impose on them," he declined. Distractedly, he watched Mayo in her movements through the kitchen, and sighed. "I just came to check on a wound."

"She would be so happy..."

Tomoe´s face was strangely serious when she said this, and, for a moment, Kenshin was surprised at so much passion hidden behind her subdued voice. Even into her eyes, which were now fixed on the window outside in front of which the girls were now playing, he thought he was able to spot flying sparks of quiet intensity.

And he understood. It was not of Yomo that she was speaking of  now, nor of any other of the women who were there with them. It was of Miyoko, playing with her friends under the sun.

No. he thought, while he nodded to her and swallowed deeply as Mayo gave him what he had requested. I do not want her to be like us either.

"Thank you very much." he bowed once more, heading towards Matsuo´s room.

(to be continued)