Himura Kenshin in Wonderland
By Amy the Evitable. Feedback always welcome at
Thanks to Kevin and Jenn, my wonderfully ruthless editors.
Part 4: Running In Circles*
Kenshin had performed more impossible tasks in his life than staying afloat in a tsunami of green tea while keeping dry a plate of onigiri, but not since early that morning. And this particular task was disappointingly short of opportunities for angstful soul-searching. It was just as well -- he should probably focus on searching for the door and swimming back to it rather than revisiting his bloody past. Carefully treading water, he looked around.
Ahead of him, on the crest of the wave, he caught a glimpse of a familiar-looking brown horse, carefully balancing on two legs atop something flat and bright yellow. He could have sworn it was looking at him and flashing a 'V' sign with a front hoof. He shook his head and blinked, and the horse was gone. Yokatta. This was no time to be distracted by trivial matters like the physics of sea-faring equines. He had to find Kaoru and deliver her lunch. She got terribly short-tempered when she skipped a meal.
Other than the thankfully-fleeting mirage, there was nothing but the blue sky above and green tea stretching to the horizon. The entire hallway seemed to have been washed away. Kenshin tried to feel guilty about that, but found it rather difficult as it hadn't been that nice a hallway. He was quickly distracted by a dark speck upon the horizon, and began to swim toward it. In a surprisingly short length of time Kenshin found himself climbing onto a sandy shore.
The dark speck had been a cluster of palm trees at the center of a small desert island. One of the trees sported a single coconut, which Kenshin regarded with grave misgivings. His keen samurai sense of danger was telling him that somehow, in some way, that coconut was going to fall and land directly on his head. It was fate. It was destiny. It was, he feared, irresistible slapstick.
He was distracted from his attempt to stare down the ominous lone coconut by the arrival of another drenched castaway. Sloshing to the shore with a cheerful smile was Seta Soujirou.
"Konnichiwa, Himura-san! How are you?" Soujirou shook himself, spraying water in all directions, and began to preen his feathers.
Kenshin didn't think Soujirou had possessed either feathers or a beak to preen them with the last time they'd met, but he didn't think it polite to comment upon them. He knew the kinds of radical changes that could come over a man on a long journey toward redemption. The wings were also new, but they didn't look nearly large enough to allow Soujirou to fly. They were probably vestigial, Kenshin decided.
"Konnichiwa," said Kenshin politely. "I'm fine, thank you for asking. You're looking... ano... well. What have you been doing lately?"
"Swimming, mostly." Soujirou beamed at him contentedly. "Are we the first ones here? I thought we might be; we're awfully quick, you know. But don't worry; Shishio-sama will be along shortly, I'm sure."
Before Kenshin could even begin to cope with this latest revelation, Shishio was indeed stalking up the shore, muttering under his breath about having sand in his bandages.
Kenshin could only gape in horror. Still more castaways were washing up. They were all familiar, and left Kenshin with a sinking feeling of dread. Jineh; the priest who'd taught Sano the Futae no Kiwami; Raijuta who'd broken Yutarou's arm; even the men of the Assassination Group of Five...
(He'd tried, he'd really tried, to keep track of the names and causes of everyone who had challenged him to prove some sort of a point about ethics or philosophy or the nature of samurai honor, but there were just so many of them! Eventually one face and rant began to blur into another. He'd long since given up on remembering the names and faces of all the petty thugs he'd defeated; but if someone went to all the trouble of explaining the deeper meaning behind the conflict, he felt he owed them his best efforts to remember. Really, Kaoru had a much better head for that sort of thing, probably because her training hadn't involved quite so many blows to it.)
The arrival of so many enemies who were either dead or in prison was bad enough; worse yet, each person had feathers, or fur, or pointed ears. On some people -- Kaoru, for example -- it was kawaii, but Kenshin could have happily lived his entire life without ever seeing Jineh again, much less a Jineh adorned with long whiskers and a bushy tail.
There seemed to be a certain amount of grumbling among the dozen or so warriors now standing on the shore, mostly having to do with being wet.
"A true warrior cannot stand around dripping green tea," snarled Raijuta. "Would this peaceful Meiji era seek to deny us towels as well as swords?"
There was a general murmur of agreement and a call for some sort of action, preferably a violent revolution against the Meiji government. Shishio looked up from his attempt to lick dry the bandages on his hand, his ears perking forward alertly. He took charge of the crowd with the ease of long practice.
"The situation we find ourselves in is unacceptable to men of honor. Our hands drip not with the blood of our enemies, but with tea. Action is called for!" He groomed his whiskers as he pondered a moment. "I have the solution. We shall have a race. The strong will have both speed and endurance. They will win the race, and in the winning, achieve the dryness they seek. The weak will be food for the strong." Shishio grinned, revealing sharp, pointed teeth.
"But how do we know when we've won?" inquired a voice from the crowd.
Shishio folded an arm across his chest and propped his chin on a hand. "A good point. We need some sort of standard to measure ourselves against, to know when we have succeeded." Dark eyes peered from behind bandages, taking in the island, bare of anything except the fighters and the palm trees. His eyes lit on Kenshin. "Very well. We'll know we've won when we've beaten the Hitokiri Battousai!" declaimed Shishio. There were nods of approval all around. It seemed to be something of a tradition amongst them. "Then.... begin!"
With a shout, the assembled warriors charged at Kenshin.
"Oro?" The island was small, no bigger than the Kamiya property, and there were few directions to run. His pursuers followed him as he ran around the circumference of the island, once, twice, a third time...
Jineh was catching up to him. "You can't possibly beat me! You haven't killed a man in ten years!"
"Eleven," corrected Kenshin mildly.
"Eleven years! Get angry! I want to race against the true Battousai! Return to who you were during the Bakumatsu! I can beat you easily as you are now!" Jineh pulled ahead of him, laughing madly. The wild laughter continued as Jineh raced along the shore, only to end in a sudden shout of fury. Over the palm trees, across the island, came Jineh's scream of rage: "Damn you! You're ahead of me again! I'll defeat you yet!"
Round and round the island went the race, runners strung out along the shore like beads on a monk's necklace. Kenshin was beginning to pant and the dampness of sweat was replacing the tea soaking his clothes. "This is a ridiculous race. No one can win; the only possible outcome is for sessha to lose. Really, being bitten by Shishio wasn't so enjoyable that sessha is willing to do it again."
"That's the thing about all that bloodshed and waving katanas about," observed Soujirou placidly as he paced Kenshin, scarcely breathing hard. "Once you've started, it's hard to get out of it. You just keep killing and killing, and each kill makes it necessary to kill more people. It's like being trapped in a really nasty circle. Someone should write a book about that. Here, let me help you with those." Soujirou took the plate from him. Although the onigiri hadn't seemed terribly heavy, it was much easier to run without them. It was as if Kenshin had put down a heavy burden.
"Arigatou de gozaru. But I thought we were both done with that," protested Kenshin. "All the killing."
"Ah, so desu. Shall we be going, then, Himura-san?"
"Going where?"
"There's only one way out of the race," observed Soujirou, as he spread his undersized wings. "Up." The pathetic little wings began to flap, and unbelievably, Soujirou took to the sky with a smooth and untroubled grace.
"Chotto matte de gozaru!" cried Kenshin. "Chotto matte!" He leapt toward Soujirou, his fingertips brushing against Soujirou's sandal at the apex of his leap but finding no hold. Soujirou continued to ascend. There was only one high place Kenshin could leap from if he was to catch the smiling boy with the not-so-vestigial wings.
Kenshin leapt onto the palm tree, wrapping his arms and legs around it. "Chotto matte! You've got Kaoru-dono's lunch...."
As he prepared to push off against the tree trunk in one last attempt to stop the lunch-napping Soujirou, Kenshin looked up to see destiny rushing towards his face, in the shape of a coconut.
And then he saw no more.
*Well, I thought about letting it be a caucus race, but Shishio informed that samurai didn't do caucus. Would you have argued with him? (Especially with risu-Jineh hanging around, no less? And if anyone wants to try drawing any of these folks – risu-Jineh, neko-Shishio, dodo-Soujirou, or anyone else -- I'd love to see the results. I've got a gorgeous usagi-Kaoru that Sou-chan did for me.)
Japanese Glossary:
Ano: Used here as a filler word, something like 'um' or 'er.'
Arigatou: Thank you
Bakumatsu: the recent civil war, in which Kenshin was a hitokiri.
Chotto matte: Wait a moment.
De gozaru: Kenshin's usual polite way of ending sentences.
Futae no kiwami: the name of Sano's object-shattering punch
kawaii: cute
konnichiwa: Hello, good afternoon.
onigiri: rice balls, in this case, decorated to look like bunny rabbits
sessha: Kenshin's version of "I"; literally 'this unworthy one.'
so desu: That's so.
usagi: rabbit
Yokatta: an expression of relief or pleasure, something like 'Thank goodness.'