Summary: Kaoru works at a dry cleaners and nothing is all that interesting about her life . . . that is until the mysterious Mr. B with his red hair and amber eyes showed up. Slowly Kaoru uncovers clues to something, but what? Sorta Kaoru/Battousai

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DISCLAIMER: I think it goes without saying that I don't own Rurouni Kenshin or anything affiliated with it. Why anyone would ever think someone on fanfiction.net actually owned something is beyond me but apparently something must have happened if everyone feels a need to say they don't own something. People are crazy.

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Cleaning Up After by bonessasan

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Chapter 1

Kaoru yawned as she looked at her surroundings, extremely bored. She was sitting on a stool in the back of the dry cleaning store where she worked, her hands propping up her chin, her elbows on a table. The walls all seemed to have an almost dingy gray tint to them. Kaoru hadn't decided if that was because the walls truly were that color or if it was because that was what color everything looked like to her. Everything had been gray since that fateful night.

:: Flashback (three years) ::

Kaoru walked into the house, slamming the door behind her. She cringed. Father wasn't going to like that. He was always telling her that it was bad manners to slam doors, not to mention being extremely annoying.

"Father, I'm home!" she called up the stairs cheerfully. There was no response. "Father?" she asked tentatively.

She climbed the familiar stairs and walked down the familiar hall. For some reason she wasn't able to shake the feeling that something was wrong. Her hand started shaking as she reached for the doorknob to her father's room. She looked at it curiously. 'Why am I shaking like that? It isn't like there's anything wrong,' she thought as she gently pushed the door inward.

"Father?" she whispered, wondering if he was just asleep and hadn't heard her come in. Wait, no. That wasn't very likely. She *had* slammed the door after all . . .

As the door slowly swung fully open a shocking sight met with her widening eyes. The first thing that caught her attention was the fact that the windows were open, the curtains swaying gently in the idle breeze. That didn't seem right. Father never left windows open like that. That was when she saw him slumped over his desk, almost as if in slumber.

"Father? Father?!?! Answer me!" She rushed over to him. She put one hand on the desk so that she could lean over her father to see if he really was sleeping. There was something warm and wet on her hand. She slowly lifted her hand so that she could look at it. Blood. It was only then that she noticed the pungent smell that permeated the room. There was too much blood. Too much. It was impossible that he would be . . .

"No," she whispered. "No, this can't be. You can't be dead. You can't!" She shook his stiff body roughly until she finally broke down and started sobbing. She never noticed the amber eyes that were watching her from the window.

And that was how the police had found her: gently weeping over her father's fallen body.

:: End Flashback ::

The world had lost its color after that. Kaoru first noticed it at her father's funeral. Since her father hadn't really been killed while on duty, all his coworkers from the station weren't allowed to wear their uniforms, and he wasn't given a formal funeral. Kaoru didn't care. Formal funeral or not, her father was dead. Since they couldn't wear their uniforms, all policemen wore the traditional black. It was almost as if the day itself had turned dark, devoid of light or happiness. Black. Just black.

Now that she had some time to heal, it seemed like the world had lightened to a nice medium gray. Kaoru laughed a little sardonically at that. 'Yeah, a real nice medium gray.' It was still dark, though, and true color couldn't be found anywhere. Kaoru was starting to wonder if she would ever be able to truly see colors once again. Oh, she could see colors just fine, but she couldn't sense them with her heart, feel them with her soul. She missed it. Oh how she missed it.

The obnoxious door chime going off interrupted Kaoru's reverie. She hated that thing with a passion. It was her taskmaster. It would taunt her, tell her that she'd never be free of it, that she had to jump up and play her part whenever it told her to, almost like a Pavlovian relationship. She would have dearly loved to take a hammer to the stupid thing, but she couldn't. As much as she disliked the stupid thing, she still needed it. Curses. She was perfectly fine in the realm of her thoughts, she didn't need to be reminded that she was at work.

In preparation before she walked from behind the wall that separated the back from the front of the store, she pasted on a fake smile. She felt like a frickin' Barbie, smiling like that. It was all a part of her job, though, so she had to do it, no matter how hypocritical the action was.

"Hello," she said cheerily. She could be a good actress when she needed to be. 'Maybe I should pursue acting, rather than staying in the oh-so- lucrative dry cleaning business.'

But no matter how good she was at acting, she wasn't able to hide the shock she felt when she saw the customer.

He wasn't very tall, probably only a few inches taller than Kaoru herself. But it wasn't his height that had surprised her. He had fiery red hair. Not brown with a reddish tint, not strawberry blonde, or auburn, but RED. He also had a curious cross-shaped scar on his cheek. Kaoru couldn't help but wonder how someone would go about getting a scar like that. Oddly it made him look somewhat dashing, almost dignified. Kaoru was sure that there had to be an impressive story behind the imperfection.

The man looked up when she greeted him. His eyes were almost even more shocking than his hair. They were a surreal shade of amber. They made her shudder involuntarily and she hoped that he hadn't noticed. That would be bad PR, but if the man had noticed he didn't show any outward sign of it. She felt a little relief at that, but she was never truly at ease around customers and this man was *certainly* no exception.

He put a pile of clothes on the counter. Kaoru pulled out an order form and mindlessly went through the procedure she could probably do in her sleep.

"Name?"

"Mr. B," the man answered. His voice was cold and hard.

She gave him an odd look for a second but shrugged her shoulders and wrote it down. Who knows, maybe that really is his name. Odder things have happened, after all . . . .

"Phone number?"

"Don't have one. Don't worry about it."

"OK," she said reluctantly, drawing out the 'K'. "Did you want starch?" she asked, motioning with her hand to the pile.

"No. No starch."

"Okay then, your clothes will be ready tomorrow after six," Kaoru said, gathering all the clothes up into her arms as she headed toward the back to tag them all in so they wouldn't be separated when they were cleaned. "Have a nice day," she called over her shoulder, but no one was there. 'How odd.' She hadn't even heard the door chime when he left.