Author's note: I'm being so bad and essentially updating everything but For King and Country. It'll get done, promise. The chapter's just... slow going. Anyway, have some Kaoru.


Title: Empty Spaces

Setting: pre-series

Characters: Kaoru

Type: One-shot

Genre: angst

Word Count: 406


Kaoru lies awake on her futon and listens to the breeze gently ring the glass chime on the engawa. She tries desperately not to think about the loneliness of the sound.

Her father had snored.

When she wakes in the morning, it is to complete stillness. No one stirs in the bedrooms, or the kitchen. There is no sound of water being drawn from the well, no slide and click of the bath's door opening and closing. The only thing she smells is the faint ghosts of her neighbors' cookfires.

There is no one to bring the house to life but her, and she is a small spirit for such a large vessel.

After she eats, she goes to the attached dojo to train. It is obviously well cared for, its wooden floor worn by many feet shifting through stances but cleaned to a rich glow. Name plates hang on one wall, neat and orderly. There are shadows on the wall where there had once been names, the master's and rows of students. There are only three names up now, Kaoru's and her two remaining pupils'.

There used to be many names on the wall. She had lost some when her father died and she took over the school, but she'd had over a dozen students who hadn't minded learning from a woman. It had all changed when that man started killing people and claiming the Kamiya Kasshin Ryuu.

Kaoru knows it is dangerous to go after him. Her father had long taught her the consequences of looking for trouble. But this man defiles her family's name, and the sword style her father created. She can't let it go. She won't just sit back and hope the police catch him; he kills those policemen in her family's name!

Kaoru's mother died when she was very young. Her father died just last year. She had thought she could bear it, thought she could draw strength from the presence of her students to weather the hollow feeling of an empty home. But even they were gone, now.

It hurts. Like she's been struck and her blood and her strength are seeping out of her.

But she won't give up. She never gives up. First she will stop the madman Battousai, stop the killing in the streets and restore her family's besmirched honor. Take back the name of the Kamiya Kasshin Ryuu. Then she will fill those empty spaces.