I do not own any of the characters of Rurouni Kenshin.

Chapter 1

"The sea calls upon vengeance, for I am buried somewhere in her." -Channing M.

Kenshin Himura crouched down on protesting knees to stoke the kitchen fire, frowning to himself. This was the fourth morning in a row that Yahiko had woken up before his kendo instructor, despite the fact that she had turned in early the night before, claiming another headache. Kenshin had sent the worried boy to Dr. Gensai's clinic to fetch Megumi, because the rurouni was troubled by the frequency of these "headaches" Kaoru claimed to have. He was brewing a ginger tea to aid her, but he had a feeling that she would only accept a cup to humor him before running to the Maekawa dojo for lessons, attempting to evade further questioning after her health.

He sighed and thought back to how peculiar she'd been behaving since they returned from Kyoto after his battle with Shishio. Their reunion had been a balm to his embattled soul and he closed his eyes at the memory of how deeply she hugged him, tears streaming unapologetically down her face and soaking his gi as she admonished him for his injuries. He himself had drank her in and noted with quiet relief that she didn't seem the worse for wear, despite having been tossed into unforgiving waters. He would never forget the sight of her stricken expression as rough hands hauled her over the deck, and her scream still echoed in his ears at night when he paced the engawa in sentry. She had seemed fine, in the aftermath, and yet… Perhaps he was simply working himself up over nothing.

If Kaoru knew the direction of his thoughts he would probably get bashed over the head with her bokken. He chuckled to himself, she was still so young. While she had seemed lethargic in the weeks following Shishio's rampage, it was probably more to do with the fact that she had doggedly pursued him to Kyoto after a period of depression. He knew from experience how draining despair could be. Kaoru would be mortified if she knew what the others had confided to him about her emotional state in the wake of his departure. He wished he could return back in time and take back that goodbye, but then… if only he could go back and change a lot of things. He felt a bitterness settle over him at that thought and shook his head to clear it.

He stopped mid-pour as he took in the sounds of Sano greeting Yahiko and Megumi out in the yard. Thank the kami he had friends like these. If only his younger self that struggled in the years following the bakumatsu could have known that given time and distance, he would wander into a girl brandishing a bokken and had a smile that rivaled the sun. A girl whose acceptance became a harbor for other lost ones to find refuge in, with a kenjutsu philosophy that defined the new era he had sacrificed everything for.

He carefully balanced the tray and strode out to meet the group, his rurouni smile ready and a greeting on his lips, when a terrified scream shattered everything. The tea tray clattered on the ground as Kenshin immediately drew his sakabato, and he was off running to Kaoru's room, the rest of them following on his heels, and he heard himself hoarsely shouting her name as her screaming resounded in his head like a thousand hoofbeats. He distantly heard Kaoru shout, "WAIT-wait-wait!" but a cannon couldn't have stopped him from crashing through her shoji wall.

"Shit!" Sano swore behind him and growled at Yahiko not to look as Kenshin scrambled back, stumbling over his friends as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Kaoru was hastily shoving down the hem of her blood-soaked yukata, which had been bunched up around pale thighs stained by rivulets of blood that dripped all the way down to her knees. Her futon was red, red, red and he felt his heart jump into his throat as he forced back the associations that his dark mind brought to the surface. She is still standing, alive, alive, she is not falling down bleeding like Tomoe.

Megumi blanched, then strode forward and and stood in front of the trembling girl, whirling around to face them with her arms stretched out, trying to block their view.

"Alright! Enough! She's alright, and you need to leave while I examine her!" Yahiko immediately started to protest before one quelling look from the rurouni made him turn around and stomp off. Sano muttered something unintelligible before glancing sideways at Kenshin and then he too took off down the hall after the spiky-haired youth. Kenshin realized belatedly as he numbly followed after them that he hadn't looked once at Kaoru's face to take in her expression because of how distracted he'd been by the blood, and glanced back as Megumi moved to tuck back in a lock of dark hair falling out of her disheveled braid. Kaoru was gazing unfocused at the dressing mirror across from her as if lost in introspection at the sight of her bloody reflection. He turned around before he noticed her reflection smile back at her and raise a finger to its lips.

When Kaoru finally woke up from being unconscious in the hospital by the sea, her first thought wasn't, "Where am I?" or "Is Kenshin alright?" but ended up being, "I should have died." She knew she had been in the water too long, she remembered struggling to break to the surface for a breath only to get battened down by crashing waves, again and again. She pretended to be asleep when the nurses checked on her as she ran over the course of events in her head, returning to the same conclusion: that she had been trapped under the waves longer than any human could have possibly held their breath, that she had been without air longer than when she had been caught by Jineh's spell... a spell that made a red haze take over her vision before her love for Kenshin gave her the strength to fight. But as much as her love for her rurouni empowered her to fight against Man, it wasn't enough to help her fight against Nature.

She should have died. It troubled her for a while, but she decided it had to be the kami's will and that questioning it would be a fruitless endeavor. She would have to accept that she probably would never reach a satisfying answer to the question of how she made it out of the sea. One didn't cross-examine miracles, one accepted it for what it was and maybe lit a stick of incense and prepared offerings to the ancestors in gratefulness. Then she was reunited with her Kenshin, Shishio was dead, Kyoto had been saved, and things were right again in her corner of the world. They could finally return home and she could work on providing peace for the former Battousai's heart and reminding him that the shadows that haunted him were in his past. Except that she started to notice the ghost that followed him around, and had to conclude that maybe some of those shadows were a little more present than she thought.

When she first saw It? Her? She thought that it was glare from the sun on the sand floating across her eyes as she finally lifted her head from his shoulder, embarrassedly clutching at his gi. She had run to him in the most forward fashion, and she had been glad that Megumi hadn't been there on the beach to cluck at her for being such a silly girl. She rubbed her eyes, stepping back from him to crane her head for a better look when she realized it was a tall woman in a white kimono, with long black hair floating on the wind. The woman was beautiful and simultaneously hideous to behold, and Kaoru absently noted that she was dead, because there was a giant wound bleeding across her chest. A sword did that, she thought, and then her eyes traveled over Kenshin's cross-shaped scar that marred his cheek. She shivered and the woman disappeared in a blink, but Kaoru knew in her bones that she would see her again.

Kenshin didn't notice, but then he had always been a little oblivious, and she wasn't one to disabuse him of the notion that things were fine. Her rurouni was skittish and she didn't want him wandering again, afraid that he would blame himself for her "seeing things" and believe that he was somehow responsible for her losing her mind. At least, she didn't think she was losing her mind. But Kaoru knew that her friends and companions wouldn't see it that way, especially if they learned exactly how long she had been underwater. Megumi would probably have some sort of medical explanation as to how lack of air affected her brain, and then she could see the rest of them having some sort of conference behind her back about how to help her, and then she would end up in some sort of western-style institution for the feeble-minded…

She just had to act like everything was normal, and soon it would become normal. She had few memories of her haha-ue, but what she remembered in the aftermath of the dark and confusing period of her death was how her otou-san had been stoic in the face of what had to be an insurmountable grief in order to carry on. It was that stoicism that served her when she had been struck by the terrible blow of his death, after years of it being "Kamiya's against the world!" as her otou-san liked to say.

If losing her haha-ue when she was small was scary, then the months of loneliness, of losing students one by one, and trying to make a bowl of rice stretch into the next week as her taxes increased while her otou-san's death benefit ran out was terrifying. It took everything she had to rise out of her futon and greet the empty house, to draw water out of the well and fight the urge to jump in when she saw the face screaming Orphan, orphan! staring back at her. She could feel darkness crowding the edges of her mind and a malaise settled over her as she would catch herself wondering how long it would take for someone to notice if something happened to her.

And then she would muse sardonically that the crows would sniff out her corpse immediately in their greed to sell her otou-san's beloved dojo. His ashes had barely been interred when the first sons-of-bitches started to trail her at the market as she bought tofu, pestered Tae about her "little kendoka friend" at the Akabeko, tried showing up at the Maekawa dojo when she had lessons… They were relentless in their pursuit of her dojo. Cajoling her to sell it, offering their sons and grandsons as husbands, some outright threatened her with bodily harm if she wouldn't cave into their demands. She set them all straight, and it restored some fire to her wearied spirit, but deep down she knew that if she didn't manage to hold onto her students then she would lose her family's dojo whether she wanted to or not. It was the thought of losing her otou-san's legacy that kept her going and kept her head held high as rumors of the Battousai practicing her otou-san's sword-style fluttered around the marketplace and dogged her steps.

She knew in the back of her mind that Kenshin saw her brandishing her bokken at him that day as a sign of some sort of salvation for the years he spent wandering trying to atone for his sins, but in truth it was the other way around. Taking care of her rurouni saved her from sliding down a path of despair that had been threatening to swallow her for months. She could look back on those dark days and feel some pride at not allowing them to take her down with them, but she also knew how close she'd been to succumbing. Would she have taken her own life like Megumi had threatened to do when faced with her dark sins? Her mind skittered away from that question every time it came up.

Now of course, such a thought was unthinkable, with the family she had built around her, from the snot-nosed brat who she spent hours dreaming of making him her eventual successor, to the fighter-for-hire-and-layabout that drove her crazy but had inexplicably become her brother, the stuck-up fox who used her wily barbs to hide a soft soul… And of course, she blushed to even think of him, her beloved Kenshin… She loved them all fiercely and would defend them from any enemy. Even if the enemy was her own strangeness. It was getting a little harder to keep it under wraps though. The headaches she'd first started experiencing on the road back to Tokyo were getting worse. They seemed to grow in intensity the more she tried to pretend not to see the lady in white. But while Kenshin appeared to outsiders as her funny, bumbling housekeeper, he had a warrior's senses and she found herself often glancing away from his perceptive stare as she massaged her temples.

She knew she was worrying him, but even as her heart ached at the thought, she felt a rising anxiety as she desperately tried not to look at the lady's moving lips. So far she hadn't been able to catch what the lady was mouthing, as she only ever seemed to appear when she was in the same room as Kenshin. She'd taken to avoiding him, turning in early after being out all day running "errands", forcing herself to sleep in so that she would miss breakfast and have to run so she wouldn't be late to her lessons. And yet despite retiring to her room all the time, she spent most of the night tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep without immediately waking up from a dream where she was drowning. Yahiko had been taunting her during their sparring sessions for looking "more like a tanuki than ever," despite the fact that she appeared to be "sleeping all the time." She had made a half-hearted effort at chasing him around the dojo in retaliation, but she knew from his troubled expression that she hadn't fooled him. It was starting to exhaust her and she knew that she wouldn't be able to keep it up much longer before the lack of sleep and skipping meals would catch up with her.

Kaoru fell back into her futon with the passing thought, this won't go on for much longer… That alone was enough to tire her, and her eyes started to drift open and shut as she stared for a while at her wan face reflected in her mother's mirror. The moonlight made her skin seem paler and her dark hair tousled about her made her resemble that lady in white she had been starting to resent. It's not killing to get rid of a ghost right? Aren't ghosts already dead? I'm going to kill her tomorrow… She was asleep not long after that, and her reflection nodded approvingly at her.

When Kaoru awoke that morning, a different lady was standing over her. No, she amended to herself, she's not quite standing so much as hovering, like a feather floating on the wind. It took her a few blinking moments to comprehend that this wasn't the lady in white, but another lady that she felt she'd met once in a dream. This lady wore black, but her bloodshot eyes made the blue of her irises striking. They stared at each other in silent contemplation, when the lady made a strange motion, causing Kaoru to shift uneasily under her covers. The lady did not take her eyes off of her for one moment, staring Kaoru full in the face intently even as she bent a little unnaturally to lift the hem of her very long kimono to her knees. Kaoru watched with fascinated dread as a small line of blood trickled down the lady's leg, she broke eye contact with the lady in black to watch as the blood eventually reached the end of her foot that dangled over her futon. Time seemed to slow as a drop clung to her toe, only to fall a few centimeters onto her coverlet. Kaoru was astonished to see that the blood did not vanish, but actually seemed to seep into the fabric.

The lady in white seemed content to hover behind Kenshin, sometimes reaching towards her as if begging her to understand what it was trying to say. While Kaoru dreaded its presence, she never felt that the ghost was trying to harm her or Kenshin. The lady in white mostly seemed to wallow in its own sadness. This lady in black however, seemed malevolent and its presence seemed to swallow the light that was streaming through her window, and Kaoru felt an oppressive ki settle over like a weighted blanket, and she was frozen.

She looked back into the ghost's face and felt her lungs seize as she read the word curled on the ghost's smirking mouth.

"Musume."

"Kaa-san?" the name escaped her in a whimper even as she clasped her clammy hands to her mouth as if Kenshin and Yahiko would come running in any moment and discover her talking to her dead haha-ue… She vaguely remembered a hazy scene from her childhood of Dr. Gensai conversing in serious tones with her otou-san out in the yard while she peeked around the corner of the engawa and the words, "miscarriage" and "childbed fever," floating through her tiny ears, although at the time she couldn't make sense of them.

Like the lady in white bled from a sword wound, the lady in black was bleeding from another kind of wound. As Kaoru considered this, the lady in black straightened up lightning quick and then dissolved into a bloody mist, and Kaoru let out a startled scream. She was covered in blood and she scuttled backwards like a drunken spider as she lifted her yukata to see, no actually, SHE had been bleeding the whole time. She had been intimately familiar with pain her entire life from practicing the art of the sword, but nothing could have prepared her for the stabbing sensation that felt like how she imagined a tantō felt when plunged into a samurai's belly. She could hear her Kenshin and her friends thundering down the hall and she distractedly looked at the mirror and saw her reflection shake its head. "Don't let them come in!" she saw the reflection mouth words that she heard in her head. But even as she turned away to call out, "WAIT, wait, wait!" it was already too late.

Kenshin had crashed through her wall and landed hard on the tatami mat. She took in the horror on his face, how his entire countenance recoiled from the sight of her, watched her friends stumble after him and was subject to their awkward stares. She tried to yank her yukata down but she knew it was too late, they all saw her weeping maidenhead. She realized that only a part of her was present in the moment, that the rest of her had floated away when her heart broke at the disgust she saw in Kenshin's eyes. She was like that bloody mist of her kaa-san, and she absently wondered if the reason the lady in white and the lady in black had visited her was to warn her that she couldn't hold onto him. He would always stumble back from her, with that look on his face.

Suddenly Megumi was in front of her and turning her away from the invasive stares and Sano's mumbled comment, "How can jou-chan's like her bleed like that and live?" she caught sight of her reflection again. Maybe I am losing my mind. It's one thing to see ghosts… But thankfully, Megumi's no-nonsense tone cut through her dull thoughts with clipped questions even as she shied away from her grasping hands that had parted her sticky yukata and began pressing on her distended abdomen.

"What?"

"I said, is this your first menses or has it been irregular and this is your first in a long while? You're bleeding pretty heavily," You're bleeding a lot, Megumi inwardly cringed.

"I… don't remember ever bleeding before." At that vague statement, she met Megumi's sharp gaze, "You, you do know what it means to have your monthly bleeding? Right?" Kaoru rolled her eyes at her urgent tone, "I've had the talk with Dr. Gensai after I turned twelve, I know that I should have had my cycle years ago, but…" she shrugged, "it didn't seem like such a bother not to have it. Tae always complains about it."

Megumi tsked and wiped some sweat off her brow in a maternal way, "And your kaa-san? Do you know anything about her cycles?"

Kaoru immediately felt the urge to lie. "I don't know anything about my haha-ue. My otou-san never talked about her after she died of a coughing disease." She didn't have to look at the mirror to know her reflection was pleased with her response. She stared at the bloody stain seeping across her futon and shivered.

She yanked herself back and clasped her yukata close from Megumi's clinical gaze. She met Megumi's dark eyes and pleaded, "Can you just help me wash up? Please? I just want to go back to bed. And forget this ever happened. These cramps hurt like hell," The understatement of the century, Kaoru wavered as her legs trembled under the weight of her pain. Something in Megumi's probing stare softened and she let the smaller girl stumble against her.

"Alright, but I want you to remember that it's natural to bleed. Let the boys be idiots about it, but if not for their mothers' bleeding they wouldn't even be here." Kaoru let herself tune out Megumi's rant about the immaturity of men as she was gently guided out of her room and to the bathhouse. She could feel Kenshin's roiling ki and turned her head away from it as they passed by the kitchen. She felt her earlier sadness become hard inside of her. How dare he look at me like that and turn away. As if he's never seen blood before. He must have seen more blood than mine when he killed that lady in white.

Unseen in another room, Kaoru's mirror cracked and her reflection finally vanished.