So, this is a collection of connecting one-shots. I got an idea from a friend who said "I feel like the manga doesn't tell us anything about him as a kid" which I guess makes sense. And I'm rereading the manga right now and I've decided two things: one, that Kaoru really bothers me (I don't like the whole damsel in distress thing) and two, it bothered me that right after he learned the succession technique, it didn't work. Also that everything is explained during a pause in a fight, but most manga do that so it's okay. And because of this I've decided to be annoying and write fanfiction.

Sort of AU but could make sense canonically. Maybe. Takes place both during (including Remembrance) and before the manga. I haven't watched the anime recently enough to add certain things.

And just so you know, I'm mildly dyslexic. Please excuse the typos, I have trouble proofreading. My grammar and what not is good though and it still flows.

(kind of hard to explain why, but he's younger too - it's been five years rather than ten and he served from 13-18 rather than 14-19 so he's about 23. long story)

Disclaimer: nothing you recognize is mine.

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"The Start of Something"

A year from now, a little boy named Shinta will tell Seijuro Hiko, "My parents died last year from cholera."

What the child leaves out is that the day his father first started to show signs of fever, his mother sold him and his older brothers into slavery. At the time she didn't enough strength to work the fields herself and needed some way to pay for medical treatment. He was bought by a slave trader who'd stopped in town almost immediately. When he thinks back on it years later, he realizes that he isn't sure if they died at all and if his brothers ever made it out alive.

"You sure you want this one?" the trader asks when he's handed off to his first owner (like all of them, he repressed the memory too much to remember his name), struggling and squirming until he exhausts his little eight-year-old body. "We haven't broken him in yet."

The slave owner smiles. One of his teeth is missing and a few more are chipped. He smells of sweat, sake, and dirt. He's fat and tall like a rich man and Shinta had always been small and slight for his age; he barely goes past the man's waist. The man says, "I like the young ones best that way."

Shinta doesn't understand this. As a child, he has no reference, no knowledge. He is naive and easily moldable and the trader just shrugs. After the slaves are out of his hands, he doesn't care what happens to them. Even if it is a kid with defiantly narrowed eyes like dark irises and hair like blood and if he hadn't seen his parents himself, the trader would've suspected his mother to be a Westerner.

Once all this is over, Shinta will hate himself in a way that never goes away.

.

Before the cholera, he'd been hit before - hard and often - but that doesn't even compare.

He wakes up to the pale light of night's ending, covered in a scratchy old blanket that smells of horses. He's on the floor and his whole body is in worse pain than the time his brother Akira accidently pushed him down the giant hill. The slave owner's hand is as big as his chest and he doesn't know how many times he was hit, but he knows he passed out after it escalated to -

(he represses this memory too even as it bursts of the seams of his subconscious)

"Good, you're awake," says the man when Shinta's purple eyes roll up to see the faint dawn. When he doesn't speak right away, a hand roughly grabs his short hair and pulls him up. His scalp burns and he can't help but scream, hands clutching tightly at the blanket he somehow managed to grab. Then the man drops him on his feet and his legs can't hold him up from all the bruises and he topples. Cloth is suddenly throw at his face. "Get dressed. I need to make sure I didn't break you beyond repair."

Shinta feels as if he has, but he forces himself to move anyway. He doesn't want to repeat yesterday's experience. In his childish, optimistic mind, he doesn't believe he will ever have to.

But he's wrong. And it never spots hurting.

.

This is the thing about slavery: it doesn't matter how well you behave because the moment you mess up, there comes the hand, or the leg, or any other part of the body that can be used as a weapon.

Shinta never gets used to the pain, but he does get used to being hit. He tries his best to follow orders but he isn't perfect. A dropped plate, a knocked over chair, dawdling too long to get up, dawdling too before helping his owner out. The man isn't merciful and the boy begins to flinch at every twitch of his hand, every creak of the floorboard when the sound resounds from a place to close to his location. He's dropped weight and he was as light as a feather when he was first sold. All ribs can be seen and every ridge of his spine sticks out. Overtime he starts to look more and more feminine.

Then one day his master says, "You're beginning to bore me."

Half a month later and he's in the hands of someone else.

.

His second owner's name he almost lets himself remember but he knows that if he does, he'll remember all of them.

But this man is good to him. He's old and a widower with a leg he damaged badly in battle. In his youth, apparently, it didn't both her, but now that he's gotten on in his years he cannot move as well as he would like. So he buys a slave to do the cooking and the washing and treats him as more of a servant. When he has to go to town to buy supplies, he's given some pocket money to get a sweet if he wants one. The flinching refuses to leave him, but he slowly begins to feels like a person again. He gets a toy out of it too, a small top his owner teaches him how to spin.

After the purchase is made, the old man smiles kindly down at him and asks, "Tell me, child, what is your name?" The boy looks up at him, his oddly colored eyes wide and fringes of red covering his face. He mumbles something. "I'm sorry, but I wasn't able to catch that."

"Shinta."

The name is barely more than a whisper and feels unfamiliar in the boy's mouth. He flinches when a hand touches his hair but it's soft and kind. His owner - no, his something that can't quite be named - is quiet in his mannerisms. "Let's go home," he says, "Shinta."

Three months later, Shinta cries at his funeral.

.

After this one commits suicide from a loss of honor, he ends up in the hands in the hands of the second round of traders again. The leader scowls when he sees him and hits him for being too much a hassle. Then he sets off to find someone to take Shinta off his hands permanently. As it turns out, uniqueness is admirable and within three days he's purchased for a third time.

"To never having to see you again," says the trader, raising a glass in the fashion of a toast. Exhaustion is set too deeply in his bones for Shinta to hate him.

The new owner makes the first one seem kind.

It doesn't take long for Shinta to realize his entire purpose is to relieve the man from stress. All of slaves are older and stronger, working the fields and cutting firewood, or young, pretty women to tend the house keeping. No one looks at him when he first arrives, intentionally avoiding his gaze. Since this is not the first time (there was before too and it's this memory, these multiple incidents that makes it so hard for him to just forget), he knows what this means. He's too tired to care.

During the two month period that this ownership encompasses, Shinta is only awake a handful of times or so it feels. He loses tracks of days, of weeks, of months. One of his lungs is permanently damaged, though this is not something he'll find out for another few weeks. His repression begins as early as now.

One morning he looks at his owner, no familiarity on his face, and he asks, "Who are you?"

For that one, he's out cold for a day.

.

This owner is his breaking point.

He's entering his eighth week there. Two days ago he turned nine, though he doesn't know it. The air outside is muggy for the first time this year and reminds him of summer nights at home, trailing after his older brothers as they wandered around the countryside, pretending to be samurai. It's one of his few, solid memories untainted by the neglect of his parents or the grip of a fist around his arm. But then the man is here too and all the bad memories of the past few months come floating back despite the repression, clashing badly with the goodness of his lost childhood in that instant his -

(his large purple eyes flash molten gold and it's then that the owner, as he has his slave against the wall, realizes he's fucked)

mind momentarily splinters.

The boy has almost no strength in his small, abused body at all but a surge of desperation causes him to suddenly lash out, struggling hard enough that the man drops him as he stumbles back. Shinta hits the floor with a thud, smacking his temple against the wood of the floor. Before he loses consciousness, he sees the man's sandal break, the seemingly slow fall downwards, and the base of his head crack against the corner of the desk. Even only half alive himself, Shinta knows he died.

Life gets better, after that.

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"Shinta is too soft for a swordsman," Seijuro Hiko tells him as they stand in front of the graves of the three women who sacrificed their lives for him. His small hands ache, cracked and bleeding, one cut running up as far as his wrist. There's a scrape on his elbow. His hair is sticky with dried blood, unnoticeable when combined with its color. "Your name is Kenshin now."

This man - this Seijuro Hiko whose name the boy happily, willingly remembers - is the first to see the potential in the lost cause that stands in front of him. His parents always thought he was a waste of space, the traders and owners looked at him as property. But this is different and the man understands it too so he leans down and picks the kid because he sees clearly that he's existing on adrenaline alone by now and it's about to run out.

The boy tenses but compiles and for now lets himself be carried reluctantly. His whole body aches from the walk and the shadows of the week ago beatings and he gives up. For now he is neither Shinta nor Kenshin and neither a slave nor a swordsman in training. Instead he's just a kid with the slightest of hopes and no expectations.

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Review please! Sorry, I just love those. xD Anyways, if you haven't, go read the author's note at the beginning. It's worthwhile.