10. Monday morning

Beep -- beep -- beep -- bee--clik

Yuriko rolled over and switched off her alarm clock, then sat up on the futon and rubbed at her eyes.

Monday morning. Seven o'clock.

She got to her feet and shambled out of her room, down the hall, down the stairs, over to the bathroom. She'd done this a thousand times.

She twisted open the taps and splashed some lukewarm water onto her face, then blinked blearily at her reflection.

Monday morning. Got to get to work. And there was one other thing...

Kenshin!

Had it been--

No, it couldn't have been a dream. Yuriko was suddenly wide awake. She scrubbed the water off her face and raced back up the hallway.

Seven o'clock already. Five past by now. Oh god, if he's gone...

Yuriko clenched her teeth and took the stairs two at a time, fighting off the mental image of an empty room, futon and quilt folded neatly and stacked against the wall and Kenshin nowhere to be found.

She slowed and stopped in front of the last door in the hall, her footsteps quiet but her heart beating loudly in her ears. A random flicker of memory floated through her mind, a memory of Kenshin smiling sweetly at her and saying something about her happiness, and she slid the door open, very carefully.

The room was not empty. Yuriko closed her eyes in relief and let out a silent breath.

Kenshin was curled up on the futon, deeply asleep. He had one yukata-clad arm out over the covers, his hand loosely clutching the comforter. He'd been too tired last night to wait for his hair to dry and so he'd left it loose, a scarlet splash against the off-white sheets. She could see his face clearly.

Asleep, he looked very young. The tension, the anxiety, the exhaustion that had been on his face yesterday had aged him, but those lines were absent now, smoothed away by sleep. Yuriko lingered in the doorway, a smile playing on her lips, listening to his quiet breathing and wondering why she had assumed he was older than she was. He looked like one of the undergraduates. He couldn't be more than twenty-five.

It was because of that hug, wasn't it. The kinesthetic memory of an equal-heighted embrace. If he had been a couple of years older than her, they could have been the same height in middle school. But that memory meant nothing, after all. Kenshin could have been standing on a curb.

It had surprised her that he hadn't been awake already when she'd entered the room. Did that mean something? For a moment she worried that he might be sick, but the color in his cheeks was normal and his breathing was steady and even. Just tired, then. He'd been ready to fall over by the end of last night.

Yuriko smiled fondly. She'd let him sleep, then. She stepped back a pace and carefully slid shut the door, then hurried back to her room to write him a note.

o-o-o

Kenshin woke to daylight streaming brightly through the bare window. He sat up abruptly, unsure for a moment where he was and how he'd gotten there. Then the memories of the previous day slid gently back into his mind and he relaxed.

Back in Tokyo again. Yuriko's apartment house. And... Yuriko. The thought made him giddy. There was something fantastic, something magical there in his memories. She had looked at him with Kaoru's eyes, had smiled at him with Kaoru's smile. He felt like he was home again. Almost.

He slid out from under the quilt and got to his feet, stretching briefly as he moved. He actually felt good this morning. No aching or stiffness, and his head was clear; he felt well-rested for the first time in two months. The futon had been a delight, incredibly comfortable after the long series of nights spent in the open. And he actually felt safe here. It felt familiar, everything from the small but uncluttered space of the room to the pastel green-brown of the walls to the texture of the tatami flooring under his bare feet.

It was mid-morning already. He'd slept much later than usual. Kenshin stepped over to the large glass-paned window and looked out at the day. It was clear again, the sunshine brilliant on the pale stucco of the opposite wing of the building, and he could feel the heat already coming through the glass under his fingertips.

Yuriko's room was two doors down. The awareness was making him giddy again. Giddy, and a little bit afraid. Some of the events of yesterday had been a little too fantastic, a little too magical to be entirely real. He could still see Kaoru's eyes in his head, looking at him out of a new face framed with auburn hair. That face had become familiar in just a few hours' time.

Kenshin suppressed a shiver, turning it into a shrug. There was nothing to be done except the obvious: he should go see if Yuriko was up. He turned away from the window and noticed the slip of paper on top of his neatly-folded blouse and jumper. A note, with his name scrawled in two big kanji on the front. The handwriting was unfamiliar. He unfolded it and read.

Dear Kenshin,

I'm going to work now. You looked so tired, I didn't want to wake you. If you need anything, there's a convini on the first cross-street (turn left, 3 blocks). I'll be home around 6. There are some books in my room if you get bored.

x x x Yuriko

P.S. Don't forget they think you're a girl!

P.P.S. DON'T DISAPPEAR!

So she'd gone. Kenshin lowered his hand. He should have expected it; he'd slept far too late. Well, tomorrow he wouldn't make that mistake.

And this note meant one other thing: Yuriko had come into the room while he was asleep, and it hadn't woken him. More than anything else, this meant it was real. His subconscious recognized her.

Kenshin sighed happily, closing his eyes. The last of the fear had gone. He was home.

Well then, time to get to work, he thought briskly. Yuriko was out, but that didn't mean he should just stand around. He looked over the note again. The last line had surprised him a little. He wasn't about to disappear, not now, not after finding her again. She shouldn't have to worry about that. Kaoru had known for a long time that she needn't be afraid of him going wandering again. But Yuriko....

Kenshin frowned. How much did she really remember? She knew him; that much was obvious. But how much was memory, and how much instinct? She was still an enigma to him.

And he had disappeared in the end, hadn't he.

Kenshin sighed again. He had a lot to make up to her. He had a hundred and sixteen years to make up to her. But the only thing he could do now was to move forward. Yuriko would be home around six, and he'd wait for her here until then. In the meantime...

He slipped out of the yukata and got dressed, buttoning up the blouse a bit more deftly than he had the day before. Buttons were tedious, but he knew he'd get used to them soon enough. He pulled the jumper on over his head, then combed back his hair with his fingers and tied it into its usual ponytail.

Along with the note, Yuriko had left a hand-mirror and a small circular lacquered box, as well as the tube of lipgloss. Kenshin frowned at them in distaste as he settled down cross-legged on the floor, and instead picked up the pair of hairpins that Yuriko had given him. He had to admit they were pretty, the small flowers on their ends enameled a bright blue like the summer sky. But wearing them was still a bit embarrassing.

Well, he had to keep up this charade, at least until Yuriko returned home. He'd talk to her about it tonight, Kenshin decided as he slid the pins into his bangs. And he was not putting on that lipgloss, no matter what Yuriko would say.

Hiding his scar, on the other hand.... Well, he supposed he had no objection there. He popped open the lacquered box and dabbed at the skin-colored cake inside with a finger. He'd done something like this before, in Kyoto, he reflected as he smeared the stuff tentatively onto his cheek. There, it had been to avoid being recognized. Here, the purpose was really much the same. And he supposed this creamy powder would be more discreet than wearing a bandage.

Kenshin examined his reflection in the hand-mirror, dabbed on a little more of the stuff, and raised his eyebrows. Discreet, indeed. And effective.

All right. He'd taken care of Yuriko's first postscript. Kenshin looked at the note again, and sighed.

What in the world was a 'convini?'

Since his arrival in this strange new era, katakana had rapidly become the bane of his existence. His spirits sank now every time he caught a glimpse of the angular phonetic characters, knowing that likely as not he'd have no idea what they meant. He was picking up the foreign words as quickly as he could, but there were just so many of them.

Ah well, he thought, putting the note aside and getting to his feet. Best to stick with what he knew.

o-o-o

Ozaki Motoko dropped her gym bag onto the floor of her room and mopped her face with a hand towel. She was sweating more from the walk back home than from the workout. The day was turning into a real scorcher.

She picked her way through the clutter on the floor and knelt down in front of the low desk below the window to check her day planner. Just time for a cool shower and a sandwich, she thought, chewing her lower lip as she glanced at the clock on her desk. After that she'd have to catch the subway to class. She could finish up the reading for today's lectures on the train.

Motoko got back to her feet, already thinking ahead to the train ride and her mid-day class. A flash of color in the garden below caught her eye as she turned and she paused, brushing aside the lace curtain to look out.

"Kenshin-san," she said, surprised.

The small red-haired figure was crouched on the ground on the far side of the large bath, where the formal garden gave way to an uncontrolled riot of summer vegetation.

"What's she...?" Motoko craned her neck, trying to get a better view around one of the miniature pine trees that bordered the back edge of the bath.

Kenshin was moving, rhythmically, back and forth, scrubbing at something in a large wooden tub.

Laundry? By hand? Motoko's eyes widened in surprise.

Kenshin lifted something big and magenta out of the tub and gave it a quick wringing, then set it aside and returned to scrubbing.

Should she go out, let Kenshin know they had a machine? Motoko glanced again at the clock on her desk, mentally bracketing its face into wedges. She was running out of time, and she couldn't be late to class, not again. And Kenshin had lifted another piece of clothing out of the washtub and was standing now, tipping the wash-water into the weeds.

Motoko shook her head. No use now, and she was out of time. She'd have to talk to Kenshin later.

o-o-o

With this heat, the laundry should be dry in no time at all.

Kenshin stepped lightly up the slope of the tiled roof and into the shade of the single enormous cypress that towered above the end of the east wing of the building. He settled down a yard below the peak, resting briefly on his fingertips as he crossed his legs in front of him. Even in shadow, the gray-green tiles were hot.

He had carried the basket of wet laundry up to the old hotel's third-floor patio and hung it out on the rack to dry. He'd had to run back down and search briefly among the trees on the far side of the garden for a forked stick to lift down the cross-bars of the laundry rack -- chromed steel instead of bamboo, and heavier than they needed to be -- but other than that it had gone smoothly, a chore so familiar that he could have done it in his sleep. From the patio it had been only a short jump up to the roof.

He'd come up here to get some time to himself, to relax a little while the laundry dried. Yuriko was away, after all, and he wasn't particularly eager to spend the day chatting with her housemates without her around. He had managed to avoid them so far this morning, even when he'd had to poke around downstairs in search of a washtub and the laundry powder; fortunately, most of the residents had seemed to be out. He'd caught a glimpse of Takamori dusting the furniture in the lounge, and one of the girls whose name he hadn't caught last night had been making herself a late breakfast in the kitchen beyond the big dining room. He hadn't disturbed either of them, and he'd encountered no one else.

A breeze touched his cheek, then wafted on to stir the top of the cypress and pull a gentle ting-ling from a chime in one of the windows below, just audible above the pulsing whine of the cicadas. Kenshin brushed back the sweat-dampened tendrils of hair that had stuck to his face and then carefully removed the hairpins from his bangs. Yuriko's hairpins, with the pretty little enameled flowers that matched the color of her eyes.

He smiled, holding up the pins between thumb and forefinger, tilting them to catch the light of the sky. They reminded him somehow of the time Kaoru had given him her favorite hair-ribbon. The memory was fresh even now, ten years on. The ribbon hadn't been a gift. It had been a loan: a small obligation, a social duty engineered to bring him back to the Kamiya dojo after his fight with Jin'e. A way of telling him that she wanted him to return. The moment when he'd finally understood her intention.... That moment had stayed with him, a cherished memory, untainted by the rest of that day's events.

She had given him her ribbon, but she hadn't forced him to tie up his own hair with it. Pretty as they were, these hairpins were a bit embarrassing. At least she hadn't tried to dress him up in a flowery kimono, Kenshin thought as he slipped the hairpins into one of the patch pockets on the front of his blue jumper. That would have been just too much.

Released from the pins, his bangs had fallen forward over his forehead, returning to their natural unruly state and stirring pleasantly in the breeze. Kenshin sighed contentedly and lay back on the roof tiles, lacing his fingers together behind his head and gazing up at the blue dome of the sky. The warmth in the tiles soaked slowly through the back of his jumper.

Aside from the heat, it was a perfect summer day, clear and brilliant, the sky the color of... the color of only itself. Such a profound blue had no earthly comparison. The deepness of it, the intensity that seemed to pull one upwards and swallow one in its vastness. Kenshin watched as a pair of swallows darted by, high overhead. There was another flying thing in the sky as well, a bit to the left; a small narrow-winged silhouette, pale against the deep blue, tracking its way slowly across the vast dome and leaving a razor-thin line of cloud in its wake.

Kenshin smiled up at it, following its gradual progress across the sky. He had noticed the lines in the sky soon after arriving in this strange new world, but he hadn't given them any conscious thought until last week. The long walk to Kamakura had given him welcome time, not to think as such, but just to contemplate his surroundings. Lost in the pleasant hypnosis of long-distance walking, surrounded after two months in Tokyo by the hills and trees and soft sounds of nature, he'd watched the tracks across the blue dome of the sky, watched as they'd slowly drifted and spread with the high-altitude winds, watched as they were joined from time to time by a new track, parallel, sharp and ruler-straight at first and then spreading in turn as time drifted slowly by.

Around mid-day he'd finally caught sight of the source of the lines, and understood what it was that caused them: flying trains, making their way across the sky, leaving behind their typical plumes of steam. He'd watched them off and on for a few hours more, as he'd passed around the outskirts of Yokohama and continued onward, and realized that he hadn't been quite right. A train was mechanical; he'd learned that from Kaoru's lecture on the train to Yokohama all those years ago. It was moved by steam in some way that he hadn't quite followed, the pressure somehow driving its wheels forward. But wheels would do no good in the sky; a flying train would have to flap its wings or something. And the wings of these craft were fixed.

He'd puzzled over this through miles of countryside until realizing that they must be something slightly different. Rocket kites. That's what they were. Though he'd never seen it, he'd heard that ninja from before the Bakumatsu would sometimes strap themselves to giant kites to spy or infiltrate castles from the air. And he had fragmented memories from Kyoto -- blurred by the heavy doses of painkillers that Megumi had slipped repeatedly into his soup during that time until he'd caught her at it and begged her to stop -- memories of Yahiko's tale of his fight against Henya, the Flighted One, of how the strange swordsman had used the blasts from dynamite to hurl himself into the air, of how he'd caught the shock-driven wind in kite-like wings. The flight of these modern craft was different again, too steady to be driven by explosions. It had been a natural step then from dynamite to rockets. Everyone knew about fireworks rockets; scaled up, they could easily be used to propel such a craft.

The aircraft passed beyond the trees and out of sight, and Kenshin turned his eyes back to the deep blue of the zenith. Not much had changed, really, in a hundred and sixteen years. From steam trains to cars to rocket kites, things were really much the same.

Except for the food. And the laundry detergent.

Kenshin inspected the back of one hand with a frown. It was chapped and red: the laundry powder had stripped away the natural oils, and had threatened to take the skin along with them. It had done a spectacular job on the laundry, though, particularly on his old hakama which was now almost too dazzling to look at. He'd never seen clothes get so white so quickly. It was unnerving, almost. Unnatural. He wouldn't have thought it possible.

He'd probably used too much detergent. Yes, that must be it; the stuff was awfully concentrated. Next time he'd experiment with using less. Kenshin folded his chapped hands behind his head again and closed his eyes with a sigh. The roof tiles were warm beneath his back, the chee-erup of the cicadas loud in his ears. It was a perfect summer day, and the laundry would be dry soon.

Author's notes:

kanji - non-phonetic Japanese characters; adopted from Chinese long long ago.

katakana - one of the two phonetic Japanese alphabets (the other is hiragana); usually used for foreign words.

convini - convenience store (actually spelt 'combini,' but that would have been too obscure)