I don't normally subscribe to the idea of Battousai and Rurouni being separate personalities, but this little what if? plot bunny popped into my head and wouldn't go away. How would they view one another?
Rurouni Kenshin © Nobuhiro Watsuki.
254 word drabble. One shot.
Fire and void. Light and darkness. They've always been opposites. One fiercely loyal, passionate, determined, alive. The other, a remnant, locked away, a memory of pain and loneliness and desperation, of death.
Violet and amber.
What people don't seem to understand is that…they don't hate each other. How could they? They're the same person, rurouni and hitokiri, violet and amber, forever merging and dividing. Sometimes, in hazy dreams, they see one another. They touch. There is that understanding. I am me and you are you. Polar opposites. A drawn katana and a sheathed sakabatou. Amber and violet.
They will never be one, but sometimes they bleed together. And that's where the trouble starts. When she becomes afraid, and he feels regret and the other one feels only pain. They both love her. They both see her terror.
He would die to see her safe, but she sees only amber and when she screams in the night, he knows what she sees in her nightmares. Her worst fear, rurouni dead, defeated, pushed back, suppressed, and hitokiri staring back at her. She doesn't understand, they don't understand, no one understands, except maybe Saitou, the warrior, the predator, the wolf.
I am me and you are you. Violet and amber. Separate, irreconcilable, contradictory, and yet deep down the same man, with the same loves and loyalties and desires.
She does not see that. So Battousai turns his back and dreams of white snow and red blood and plums in the darkest corner of Himura Kenshin's head.