Chapter 7

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Chapter 8 is almost done, and should be posted in the next few days. I'm actually trying to get this done and out of my freakin' head so I can go back to the work I actually should be doing, hence, the rapid writing rate. The story's complete in my head, it's just a matter of typing really fast to get it out now.

PraiseDivineMercy -- if Hiko's an Immortal, Kenshin doesn't know about it. For the record, it was tempting for me to write Hiko into the story as an Immortal because of the comments about BOTH of them looking young in the show. He could well be -- it could be an explanation for why he adopted Kenshin in the first place. If he sensed Kenshin was a pre-immie and adopted him for that reason, it would make sense. But it's not something I'll touch on in this story. I don't need to.

Janey-in-a-bottle -- ah, but is the little girl just a little girl?

A comment on Kenshin vs. MacLeod's fighting abilities -- Mac's survived 400 years and hundreds of fights to the death. This says he's very good. However, there's a story telling style difference at play here -- anime vs. live action drama. If Highlander were animated -- err, animated with some respect for the characters and universe -- in the same style as RuroKen there's no doubt that MacLeod would have been portrayed similarly to Kenshin, with wild acrobatic leaps and impossible feats of agility and strength.

That said, I'm writing this as if Kenshin IS the better fighter, because it makes "storytelling sense" and in the Highlander universe, MacLeod is never portrayed as the best there is. Kenshin is definitely one of the top swordsmen in his 'verse.

(Highlander was turned into an animated series around 1994, I believe. It sucked in many profound ways and Mac wasn't in it.)

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Outside, it the rain had stopped but leaden grey clouds hung low over the city. The air was cool, crisp, and smelled of the ocean.

He asked directions at the front desk and determined that his hotel room was a few miles from here. He would walk; he needed the exercise and the time to think. He put his hands in his pockets and headed in the direction of his hotel, mulling things over.

Heather was a problem that he wasn't entirely sure how to fix. His first impulse was to simply kidnap her and make her straighten up, but junkies had been around since time immemorial, heroine wasn't too different from opium, and painful past experience had taught him that you couldn't force an addict to go sober. He'd had unfortunate experiences with addiction before -- hell, his master had been a rather bad-tempered drunk.

Didn't matter what the drug was -- the only way an addict would ever clean their life up was if they decided to change their life. And that decision took incredible amounts of resolve and fortitude. Once the decision was made, support from friends and family was helpful. Until then ...

He sighed. The best he could do was give her a safe place to stay until he figured out how to motivate her to make that decision. He'd be apartment hunting, later.

And he'd need to get clean needles, he supposed, no sense in having her catch a disease by using dirty ones -- he made a mental note to make sure she was tested for all the usual nasties and treated for the ones that could be cured. Hopefully, the doctors would do it, but he'd make sure. Some of the scourges of his time could be treated now, which was at least fortunate. She'd been living an unclean life; God only knew what she'd contracted.

After that, he needed to try to get her into a rehab program of some sort -- which, if past experience held true, probably meant a waiting list for a good one, which meant he'd be babysitting a druggie until there was an opening.

Maybe kidnapping would be a viable solution after all ... No. He'd tried that before, a few times, with others. Hadn't worked.

She wasn't a citizen, so the hospital would only provide crisis care at state cost. Anything more than that, someone would need to pay for -- and he suspected that would be him, as her father was going to blow his stack and probably disown her when he found out the details here.

Kenshin wasn't looking forward to that phone call at all. And he needed to make it soon. Maybe he'd get her mother, if fortune was with him.

Mentally, he reviewed his bank balance as it walked. It would be enough for a few months. He'd need to talk to his accountant soon too, move some money around, maybe sell some stocks. He was wealthy, these days, but not inexhaustibly so. At least Seacouver was cheaper than Tokyo. Was he going to be here long enough to let his lease on his apartment in Tokyo go? It was up in a month; he'd either have to renew it or have his things (few though they were) put into storage.

The money spent on an tiny apartment in Tokyo would pay for a palace here. He decided he'd call Atsuko and have her pack his things up. He liked Canada; maybe he'd stay awhile, unless the family needed him.

And, did he want to share the apartment with Heather? If he did, he could keep an eye on her. On the other hand, she'd know he was keeping an eye on her and might end up spending the night somewhere unsafe if she was trying to avoid him. Perhaps it would be best to give her privacy.

Of course, he would need to keep a discrete eye on her -- he foresaw quite a few nights lurking in the shadows in his future. And, given what he'd seen of Heather of late, he mentally added condoms to the list of things that he needed to make sure she had. He'd leave them discretely in her apartment when she wasn't looking, because he didn't think he could actually hand them to her or even say the word in her presence without turning as red as his hair. Buying them was going to be bad enough.

From past experience with her, he gave her a week, tops, after getting out of the hospital before she had a new boyfriend. Because Heather was like that. She'd had a perpetual string of boyfriends since about age fourteen -- something that had infuriated her father, amused her mother, and worried Kenshin. The majority of them had been unworthy. Losers, in American slang.

Her choice in boyfriends had worried him because it was a symptom of how desperately damaged her heart was. She'd sought approval from men -- boys, mostly, but she thought they were men -- because she did not get it from her parents. And she'd been willing to accept that approval from a remarkable parade of scum.

He sighed. Life had been so much simpler when he was a penniless wanderer. Really, it had been.

He could hear Kaoro's laugh at that observation. Ah, Kenshin, she'd say, you wouldn't have your life any other way. You live for this. Well, he'd be happier if Kaoru were still standing at his side, but otherwise, yes, he wouldn't change much about his life if he could.

Find one like yourself after I die, she'd suggested, towards the end, when she was stooped and grey and frail and the neighbors thought he was her handsome young grandson. Find a woman who will live for you forever. You shouldn't be alone, Kenshin.

He never had. He'd never so much as looked at another woman in the many decades since she'd died. Kaoru had expressed her opinion of this a few times after death and once, when he'd died temporarily and gone to the light for a little while, both Tomoe and Kaoru had been there and they had ganged up on him, telling him he should not live alone. They'd been insistent and had presented a formidably united front.

After that encounter, he'd dated several women without interest (including Atsuko, who'd been about thirty at the time) and had found he didn't want a girlfriend at all. Though Atsuko had, at least, ended up a good friend and drinking buddy. She sometimes teased him about "being one of the girls" when they went out together, calling him "little sister" now because he looked so much younger than she did, but that was okay -- as long as she wasn't hitting on him.

About once a year, she did proposition him, and once a year he respectfully declined, and they didn't speak for a month, and then they were good again. It was a pattern that had spanned two decades and, he suspected, would continue until she was dead of old age.

Meh! He shook his head in disgust at his own morose and rambling thoughts. His love life, or lack thereof, was not the issue here.

He walked with his hands in his pockets for half a block more, consciously focusing on the new city -- he truly did love to travel -- rather than his troubles. Despite the weather, there were quite a few people about; he watched them with discrete fascination, observing the activities of what was still a very foreign culture to him.

He stopped for a moment to observe a couple of boys playing basketball in a park, then admired a small garden of roses in front of a bank building. There was no real hurry to get to his hotel. A shop window full of trinkets caught his attention; he stepped inside briefly to buy several brightly colored toys and arranged with the shopkeeper to have them shipped to the children whose birthdays would be soon. And he purchased a t-shirt with a cat on it, for Atsuko, and a pair of earrings for Atsuko's mother -- who was one of the last people alive who actually had known Kaoru and Sanosuki and Yahiko, Megumi and Misao and Aoshi, all of them, when she was a child and they were old. She remembered and could reminisce with him about all his friends and his family. She'd even attended school with Kenji's youngest daughter, separated by about four years.

She had funny stories of her own, to remind him of what had once been -- of the practical joke war that had developed between Yohiko and Misao over the years, with ever more elaborate pranks, or the time that Kaoru had gotten mad at Sano at a dinner and knocked him flat in front of many of the younger members of his family. Or the time that the whole gang of them had decided Kenshin 'needed a bath' because he was offensively smelly after a day spent cutting wood for Yahiko's wife, and they -- all grey-haired and elderly -- had ambushed him and tossed him into a pond.

They'd kept him sane, kept him humble. He missed them desperately. And soon, as the last of the eldest generation passed away, his friends would live only in his memories. There would be no one to talk to, no one who knew any of his friends except as faces in old photographs.

He was cutting across another park, head full of memories of times long past, when the buzz tickled at his senses. It was the strong ki of another Immortal.

It wasn't MacLeod, he was sure of that in seconds. He slid a hand under the collar of his new coat and made sure his sword was loose in the sheath and that it wouldn't be fouled by the fabric of his collar if he had to grab it in a hurry. Then he scanned the park, looking for a familiar tall, pony-tailed man.

Who wasn't in sight..

The buzz was coming from the other side of some dense shrubs. Kenshin still wasn't sure if this was Mac or not. With hands in his pockets, he calmly walked around the bushes to see who it was.

The other immortal was headed his way -- they first saw each other from twenty feet away, when Kenshin stepped around a tree. He was average height -- which meant several inches taller than Kenshin -- Asian, with a round face, straight black hair cut just above the ears, and a wiry build. Kenshin thought he had a sword on him, but the ki was strong enough to warn him that this Immortal could do the see-me-not thing with his weapon.

The other Immortal scanned him head to toe several times, then said, with shock, in Japanese, "Battousai! It's you!" The man was, apparently, Japanese. The pronunciation was perfect. His expression was comical disbelief.

Kenshin's eyebrows rose and vanished under his bangs. "This one was called that a long time ago."

"Fuck yeah, you were." The man said. His English was equally perfect, and it was either American or Canadian -- Kenshin realized that there was a difference in regional accents in North America, but he wasn't good enough with the language to hear the difference. "I recognized you the moment I saw you. You haven't changed a bit."

"Do I know you, sir?" Kenshin asked, carefully. He racked his memories for a name to go with this face and came up empty.

That question earned him a cold look. "You don't even recognize me, do you, Himura?"

"I profoundly apologize, but I do not know you."

"You do," the man corrected. "But I was a child."

Oh. Kenshin still had no clue. He'd known an awful lot of children in his life -- he was pretty much a kid magnet. One, apparently, had been an Immortal -- and, judging by the tone of this encounter, didn't like him much. The man didn't seem overtly aggressive, but he wasn't shouting, Kenshin, you're alive! with great glee, either. And he'd known him as Battousai and Himura both. Who could this be?

"I am very sorry, but I still do not know you," he apologized. "I wish I did, as it is clear you remember me."

"Still not killing anyone?" The man said, sounding somewhat disgusted. "It may not even be worth the trouble to fight you. I'm actually here for MacLeod. He's worth it, an old Immortal like that."

"I won't let you hurt MacLeod," Kenshin said, with real concern. MacLeod could probably take care of himself, but ...

"Well, then, I might just have to fight you," the man said. "You beat me once, but I seem to recall you were badly injured after that. And I was only a child. And I've beaten you once as well. Shall we find out who will win now?"

Only a child. A child he'd fought. A child with a round face, and an aura that was damnably hard to read, one who'd beaten Kenshin once, but who had lost the second round. Barely, as Kenshin recalled. That had been one of the hardest fights of his life, and had Sojiro taken him seriously and come at him more aggressively in the beginning, Sojiro would have won.

And that fight with Shishio -- and the damage he'd taken earlier in that day -- had, indeed, left him weakened forever. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to affect a rematch.

"Seta Sojiro." Kenshin finally figured it out, as his heart sank. "I had hoped you would find peace."

"I did. I discovered what I truly am. I was born for this, Kenshin. I will win this Game." He sounded proud of the proclamation.

"I will not let you." Kenshin just felt exhausted. He should have done more for the boy; perhaps this was his fault. But after the battle with Shishio, Seta had just disappeared, and no one had seen him again. Obviously, he hadn't been meditating on a mountain top for a century plus of time.

He didn't have time for this, and too many people were relying on him. He couldn't die.

"What are you going to do, talk me out of it?" Sojiro's voice held great scorn. "Have you taken even one head, Himura?"

"No, Sojiro, this I have not." Kenshin said softly. "And I will not."

Sojiro spat. "You're not even worth my time, Kenshin. I've taken hundreds. You're a weak Immortal, and the benefit to killing you would be outweighed by the effort needed to do it."

The man calmly turned his back to Kenshin and walked away. Kenshin debated pursuing him -- but no, this was no place for a duel. Instead he, turned swiftly on his heel and headed for Mac's shop.

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MacLeod was packaging an antique pot up for mailing to a buyer when the door to the shop opened. A gust of wet, cold air swirled in to the warm interior of the shop along with the red-haired samurai. It was pouring outside again -- Kenshin was soaked to the skin, red hair plastered flat to his head.

"I thought you were leaving," MacLeod said, amused that Kenshin was back -- again. Kenshin was shivering, and the scar on his cheek stood out in bold relief against pale skin.

Kenshin replied, without any trace of humor, "There's a man out for your head."

"Wow, that's news." MacLeod said, with sarcasm. "Watch me run and hide."

"His name is Sojiro Seta," Kenshin said, voice deceptively mild. MacLeod realized the little guy was truly worried. "If you fight him, he will kill you."

"You know this man?" MacLeod set the pot down.

"Yes. He's good."

"I'm not exactly a beginner at this Game," MacLeod said, skeptically. Kenshin had an arrogant streak, he thought, hidden under that genial smile and friendly air, and he was underestimating him again.

"He may be able to defeat me. We've fought before. He won one round, and let me go. I defeated him the second time. I do not wish to try for the best of three, this I do not." Kenshin's words were quiet, but backed by real concern. "He was faster than I ..."

MacLeod had a hard time believing anyone could be faster than Kenshin.

"... and he fought with an unnatural calm, without emotions. I had hoped he would change, find peace and begin to understand and accept his past, but perhaps this was not to be." Kenshin sighed, heavily. There was no trace of the funny, smiling man MacLeod had come to like on his face now. His expression made him look older, and very tired. "I have observed that among Immortals who take many heads, an evil grows in their heart that is supernatural in nature. It may be that Sojiro had a sizable seed of darkness in him at the beginning, and playing this unconscionable Game coaxed that seed into growing and fruiting."

MacLeod said, "So he's after me and not you?"

"He's after Quickenings." Kenshin explained. "He said he considered mine not worth the effort. And while I do not desire a rematch with Sojiro I would not I die without a fight."

"Do you think you could kill him?" MacLeod asked, "If you fought him again?"

Those violet eyes met MacLeod's with sudden intensity. "I will never kill again, Mister MacLeod."

With no exceptions, apparently, for evil Immortals out to kill a friend. Not that MacLeod needed anyone to fight his fights for him -- but had the roles been reversed, he'd have been right there with sword in hand, telling this Sojiro guy to bring it on. He wouldn't let a friend lose his head because of a foolish ideal that had no place in the reality they lived. MacLeod shook his head, "I don't understand you at all, Kenshin. Sometimes you've got to kill. It's -- it's the lesser of two evils!"

"I will not kill." Kenshin said with slow emphasis on every word. "Ever. For any reason. If killing is the lesser of two evils, I will find a third way that is not evil at all."

"You're a fucking fool." MacLeod snapped. "Sometimes there is no third way."

"I do not wish to fight with you, Mister MacLeod," Kenshin said, quietly. He had not raised his voice once in response to MacLeod's irritated anger, not even at being called a fucking fool. "I wished merely to warn you."

"So what are you going to do now?" MacLeod asked.

Kenshin shrugged. "I do not know. I will think of something."