Kokoro No Itami Nakunaru Made Zutto: Sanctuary
By: Hitokiri Gentatsu
Authors Note: Thanks for all the reviews. Sorry this is taking so long but real life keeps interfering. Anyway, hope you enjoy this chapter and hopefully I will be able to update more often.
Chapter Four: Lost Soul
"At any rate, everyone will follow the path shown to them. It is a lonely path."
His first sensation was one of intense pain followed by a fridged coldness that seemed to sap what little strength he had and left him shaking. He tried to open his eyes but they refused to cooperate. He tried to find the strength to stand but, again, his body refused to follow orders. So instead, he attempted to remember what had happened. He searched his memories and found that they were a hazy collection of random images, unclear and undefined. The last event he could remember with any clarity was the Battle of Tobu Fushimi and the brillant crimson of flowing blood as it arced from his sword.
"My sword?" Battousai's hand went reflexively to his left side where, through the haze of pain in his fingers and hand, he could feel the smooth wood of the saya and the metal of the sword's tsuba. He sighed in relief. At least, they had not taken that from him as well.
The first thing he needed to do was to find out how much damage he had sustained, he would worry about anything else later. Carefully, he moved his arms and legs, which sent shooting pains up and down them. After a moment he decided that nothing was broken, just badly bruised. His left ankle felt like it was sprained, though from his current position he could not tell how badly and his sword hand felt badly bruised, possibly broken. He had a vague memory of his hand being smashed into a rock.
He shook off the memory and tried once more to open his eyes. The left one refused to do so but the right one opened and he saw stars and a waning moon overhead. He blinked his good eye, trying to clear up the blurriness of the sky but it stayed the way it was. He lay there for several moments, looking at the sky as if it could tell him where he was and how he had come to be so injured. When he was unable to find his answer there, he carefully sat up to take stock of his surroundings. A hiss of pain escaped him as he did so and a wave of dizziness washed over him. His chest and stomach were on fire with pain. It appeared he had broken several ribs and that someone had managed to cut him on the shoulder and across his stomach. His gi and hakama were wet and sticky with blood, which accounted for the dizziness he felt.
"I have to get out of here." He looked around and saw no one. The area was devoid of any people and he became puzzled. This did not fit with his last solid memory of a smoke covered, bloodstained battlefield.
As he was puzzling over the implications of this he saw a flickering light in the distance. He blinked his good eye several times to make sure that the light was no figment of his addled mind. It remained there.
"A house?" This, if anything, puzzled him more. There was nothing left standing at Tobu Fushimi. The battle between the two armies had left both villages in smoldering ruin.
He shook his head to clear it of those memories and instead concentrated on making himself move. With force of will, he was able to stagger to his feet and he stood there, his legs trembling and his breath coming out in harsh gasps. He remained still for several moments, unable to move for fear of falling again.
There was darkness at the edge of his vision and he felt, for a moment like he would pass out again. Only the fear that pounded through his body kept him on his feet as he slowly made his way toward the distant light. He concentrated solely on putting one foot in front of the other, inching ever closer to his goal. After a few minutes, the light resolved into a flickering lantern. A few moments more and he could see that the lantern hung next to the gate of a house.
After what seemed to be an eternity to Battousai, he collapsed against the gate, his face and body slick with sweat and blood. His breath sounded sharp and ragged to his own ears and his body was on fire with pain. That pain held him immobile and all he had the strength to do for several moments was to lean against the gate, trying to regain enough strength to knock upon it.
The moon had already disappeared beneath the tree line before he was able to pound the gate with his left fist. He made no other sound because he hadn't the strength to do so and he hoped that his knock was heard by someone inside or he would likely die out here without the ability to defend himself. There was a creaking sound as the gate opened and a white haired elderly man peeked out at him.
"I require shelter…" Battousai managed to gasp, holding onto the wall for support, his good eye trained on the man.
The man eyed the red-haired swordsman with open suspicion and began to close the gate again.
"No…please…" Battousai's voice was not much more then a harsh whisper and a look of compassion crossed the old man's features, as Battousai moved into the light.
"Please…help…me…"
The old man, throwing caution to the winds, came out of the gate and took him by the arm, throwing it about his shoulders, taking the swordsman's weight off his injured leg. He carried Battousai inside the estate and left him on the ground just inside it before closing and locking the gate.
"Arigatou…" he whispered, his head bowed and his breathing labored.
"Yamashiro Haishi," elderly man said.
"Arigatou, Yamashiro-san." The world around him was spinning and the darkness once again hovered at the edge of his vision.
"And your name is…?" Yamashiro began.
"My…name…?" Battousai's heart clinched painfully and he looked up at
Yamashiro with confusion in his eye before that eye rolled up inside his head and he passed out.
*
He jerked suddenly awake several days later because of the sun's light shining in his eyes. His hand went reflexively to the sword that lay by his side and his amber eyes swept the room but he found that it was both unfamiliar and empty. His rapid breathing slowed and the adrinaline rush disappated. As it did so, he felt intense pain burning across his stomach. He hissed and wrapped an arm protectively around it noticing it was covered in bandages. A quick check of his other wounds turned up more bandages as well as a enough bruises to start a collection.
"Kuso! What happened to me?" He tried to remember but all he could see was fire and blood. There was nothing within his memories to help him out.
His amber eyes swept the room again and his hand strayed to his sword, his senses on high alert. Slowly, he attempted to stand and, after a few moments, he was able to get shakily to his feet. The room spun around him for a moment but he was able to force it to remain still. He looked around the room. It was small but clean and smelled new. There was a scroll on the wall, covered in kanji written in a delicate hand and he walked over to it, studying the characters and still trying to figure out what happened.
The door slid open and Battousai whipped around, his heart beating wildly and his sword in his hand before he had realized what had happened. Yamashiro stood perfectly still, looking at the sword that had been leveled at him so swiftly that he had not even seen the blade move and into the golden, fire-like gaze of the man who held it. Those eyes, full of raging amber fire, froze Yamashiro's heart and held his own imprisoned within their firy depths.
"He will kill me…" was Yamashiro's panicked thought as the seconds gave way to minutes and still the two stood facing each other in silence.
Battousai's chest was heaving, causing pain to shoot across it. Then he really noticed who was in the room with him.
"The man…from the other night…"
He felt his fingers release the sword, which fell to the floor with a clatter. He followed soon after, and sat on his knees, his chest still heaving, while his heart thudded in fear of what he had almost done. His hair was covering his face and his eyes were tightly closed.
"He helped me and I…I…"
Yamashiro entered the room and set a tray of food next to the young swordsman. "It's all right. You're not the first person who has drawn a sword on me."
"It was unforgivable. You have helped a complete stranger and I was going to reward your kindness by…" He let the sentence hang there incomplete.
Yamashiro waved his hand to brush aside his protests. "It's quite all right, I assure you. There have been worse things that have happened within my sight."
Battousai silenced his voice, gazing at the man intently, confusion in his burning gaze. Briefly, he wondered if this was a trap of some sort but he shook off that idea when he saw Yamashiro smile at him with no hint of anger or hatred. He bowed politely to the man as Yamashiro pushed the tray of food so that it was in front of him.
"You should try to eat something."
Battousai eyed the food and felt his stomach growl with hunger. He began to eat slowly, knowing that if he ate to quickly he would likely make himself sick. Yamashiro sat across from him, drinking tea and eyeing the young man before him, trying to place him. Something about him was tugging at his memory. A name…a description…?
"Who are you?" he asked after several minutes of near silece, that was punctuated by the sound of chopsticks scrapping against porceline.
Battousai stared at his food a moment and then looked up at Yamashiro, a look of confusion mixed with fear in his eyes as he tried to remember his name.
"I…I…can't remember." He looked away from his rescuer's face and back to his hands, which were fisted in his hakama so tightly that the knuckles of his fingers were nearly as white as the material of it.
"I see." Yamashiro studied what he could see of the young man's face, looking intently at the deep scar that disfigured the left cheek of the other man. "What is the last thing you remember before you found this place?"
The young swordsman shuddered as a jumble of images went though his mind. He saw himself set upon and surrounded by a group of men. They all seemed to be shouting a name at him but he couldn't catch it. Then his eyes widened as the image of a battle came to his mind.
He bowed his head, still shaking and whispered, "Tobu Fushimi…the battle at Tobu Fushimi. That is the last clear memory I have, everything else is a jumble."
Yamashiro's eyes widened at the mention of Tobu Fushimi but he said nothing, not wishing to speak of the battle that had claimed the life of his son, daughter-in-law and their young child. "I'm sure you will remember in time. You were hit pretty hard in the head. Sometimes injuries like that cause a person to forget things for a time."
"What if I don't remember who I am?" Battousai's voice was panicked.
"Well, you could stay here, for a while." Yamashiro's voice held compassion for the distraught young man.
"I will have to stay here for the moment in any case. I was staying somewhere nearby, I think, but at the moment I'm too injured to travel far."
Yamashiro nodded. "Rest for now and let your body heal. In time you might even remember what you have forgotten."
"I will do so," He paused for a moment. "But as soon as I have healed I must move on." Battousai felt that there was someone after him and again he experienced flashes of the past few years on the run from something.
"Then all is well, for now." Yamashiro rose and, after bowing to the young samurai, he left the room. As he slid the door shut again, he gave the red- haired swordsman an icy glare and he whispered, "Hitokiri Battousai."
*
For the next several days, Battousai was forced to keep to his bed, recovering from his wounds. Surprisingly, he gave Yamashiro little trouble over this, knowing that he wanted to heal as quickly as possible so that he could be on his way. During the time he spent in his borrowed room he tried desperately to remember his name and the events of the past few months. He knew he had been a soldier in the recent war, brief flashes of memory indicated this; though he could not remember what side he had fought for. There were also dark and haunting images of blood and sadness that played through his mind that he didn't understand the meaning of as well as the face of a beautiful woman with sad dark eyes. These images and memories came to him in no particular order, so he had no way of making any sense of them. His only clear memory was of Tobu Fushimi and it seemed to him that he had just left there, so vivid was that memory. He could still hear the screams of the dying and wounded and smell the acidic smoke that hung over the field, wreathing it in crimson flame. Before that everything seemed to be awash in pain and regret.
He locked those memories away to examine later and tried to make sense of the memories after that battle that he still had a grasp on, hoping they would be able to tell him who he was and how he had come to be here. After several day of examining these more recent memories he was no closer to finding out his identity then he had been when he started.
"Kuso!" he thought fiercly. "Why can't I remember anything about myself or my family?"
His hands clenched into fists at his sides but his face remained impassive as he stared out the open window. He was growing frustrated at his inability to remember anything and this feeling had him on edge. Somehow he knew he had to find out and soon. It was somehow important. If he could remember even just his name then he felt sure the rest would fall into place. He wasn't sure why he felt this way but his instincts were telling him that something was not quite right here. Battousai's hand strayed to his sword, which was another puzzle to him. This was not the same sword he had carried during the war. It's hilt felt strange to his hand, heavier somehow. Its weight felt strange to him and at the same time familiar.
"Why a sakabatou? What does this say about myself?" He pulled the sakabatou from its saya and looked at the shining blade closely. He had to admit that the workmanship and quality of the blade was as fine as any he had previously wielded but that still did not answer the question of why he carried such an unusual weapon.
Something tugged at the back of his mind, a foggy memory of an oath he'd sworn to…to whom? He closed his eyes to better concentrate on the dark and hazy memory but became no clearer. All he could remember was that it was an oath that meant more to him then life itself and something he would willing die to uphold. He concentrated some more and a memory flashed across his mind: a dark room, a woman's body laying in death and the echo of his own voice.
"I will never kill again…never again."
He felt the sting of tears on his cheeks and he opened his eyes, looking at the sakabatou again. Suddenly he remembered why he carried the unusual blade. He had taken many lives, including the life of the woman whose face haunted his dreams and whose name he could not remember. She was the only one who had been able to break his pattern of killing. She had loved him for who he was, not what he could do for her. He had sworn to protect her happiness and her. He knew he had somehow failed her and she had died because of him, for him.
"That is why I carry this sword now, to make sure I never make the same mistake again." He looked at the blade with a little more respect then he had in the last hour.
He slowly sheathed the sakabatou, watching it reflect the light coming from the open window. He caught his own reflection in it and looked for a moment at the scar on his cheek, reaching a hand up to trace its deep and unhealed lines. This scar was also a mystery to him. He turned to look out the window at the birds and the small pond in the garden outside of it; the air a warm breathe on his face and his thoughts swirling in his mind.
Cold eyes watched him from a nearby tree, the man's presence was carefully masked and his dark clothing concealing him from the unwanted attention of his target. An evil smile twisted the man's features and his eyes narrowed as he watched the swordsman at the window.
"So you cannot recall who you are? Well, before I am through, Hitokiri Battousai, you will remember every sin you have committed and you will pay for every life you have stolen a hundredfold.
*
Twenty miles upstream from Yamashiro's estate, Haishidiya reached the place where Kenshin had been attacked. He had been in search for the swordsman ever since recovering from the concussion he had received at the hands of the same bandits that had kidnapped Kenshin. For three days he had been searching for his friend using every trick he had learned in his samurai days, glad for the first time in years for the training his father had given him.
"He was attacked here by several men," he read the faint traces of battle left behind by the combatants, carefully following them downstream until he came to the place where the attackers had dropped Kenshin into the raging current of the river. There was no sign that he had struggled when they threw him in.
"Probably he was unconscious at the time." Haishidiya noticed the great quantity of blood scattered throughout the area and decided it was probably from Kenshin's stomach wound. "I have to find him and soon. Aizu is not a safe place for the one who was called the Hitokiri Battousai. There are many people here who lost family to the Ishinshishi during the war. They would seek him out to exact vengence."
Haishidiya shouldered his pack and began the long walk downstream, trusting that Buddah would guide his steps and lead him to his friend before it became to late.
By: Hitokiri Gentatsu
Authors Note: Thanks for all the reviews. Sorry this is taking so long but real life keeps interfering. Anyway, hope you enjoy this chapter and hopefully I will be able to update more often.
Chapter Four: Lost Soul
"At any rate, everyone will follow the path shown to them. It is a lonely path."
His first sensation was one of intense pain followed by a fridged coldness that seemed to sap what little strength he had and left him shaking. He tried to open his eyes but they refused to cooperate. He tried to find the strength to stand but, again, his body refused to follow orders. So instead, he attempted to remember what had happened. He searched his memories and found that they were a hazy collection of random images, unclear and undefined. The last event he could remember with any clarity was the Battle of Tobu Fushimi and the brillant crimson of flowing blood as it arced from his sword.
"My sword?" Battousai's hand went reflexively to his left side where, through the haze of pain in his fingers and hand, he could feel the smooth wood of the saya and the metal of the sword's tsuba. He sighed in relief. At least, they had not taken that from him as well.
The first thing he needed to do was to find out how much damage he had sustained, he would worry about anything else later. Carefully, he moved his arms and legs, which sent shooting pains up and down them. After a moment he decided that nothing was broken, just badly bruised. His left ankle felt like it was sprained, though from his current position he could not tell how badly and his sword hand felt badly bruised, possibly broken. He had a vague memory of his hand being smashed into a rock.
He shook off the memory and tried once more to open his eyes. The left one refused to do so but the right one opened and he saw stars and a waning moon overhead. He blinked his good eye, trying to clear up the blurriness of the sky but it stayed the way it was. He lay there for several moments, looking at the sky as if it could tell him where he was and how he had come to be so injured. When he was unable to find his answer there, he carefully sat up to take stock of his surroundings. A hiss of pain escaped him as he did so and a wave of dizziness washed over him. His chest and stomach were on fire with pain. It appeared he had broken several ribs and that someone had managed to cut him on the shoulder and across his stomach. His gi and hakama were wet and sticky with blood, which accounted for the dizziness he felt.
"I have to get out of here." He looked around and saw no one. The area was devoid of any people and he became puzzled. This did not fit with his last solid memory of a smoke covered, bloodstained battlefield.
As he was puzzling over the implications of this he saw a flickering light in the distance. He blinked his good eye several times to make sure that the light was no figment of his addled mind. It remained there.
"A house?" This, if anything, puzzled him more. There was nothing left standing at Tobu Fushimi. The battle between the two armies had left both villages in smoldering ruin.
He shook his head to clear it of those memories and instead concentrated on making himself move. With force of will, he was able to stagger to his feet and he stood there, his legs trembling and his breath coming out in harsh gasps. He remained still for several moments, unable to move for fear of falling again.
There was darkness at the edge of his vision and he felt, for a moment like he would pass out again. Only the fear that pounded through his body kept him on his feet as he slowly made his way toward the distant light. He concentrated solely on putting one foot in front of the other, inching ever closer to his goal. After a few minutes, the light resolved into a flickering lantern. A few moments more and he could see that the lantern hung next to the gate of a house.
After what seemed to be an eternity to Battousai, he collapsed against the gate, his face and body slick with sweat and blood. His breath sounded sharp and ragged to his own ears and his body was on fire with pain. That pain held him immobile and all he had the strength to do for several moments was to lean against the gate, trying to regain enough strength to knock upon it.
The moon had already disappeared beneath the tree line before he was able to pound the gate with his left fist. He made no other sound because he hadn't the strength to do so and he hoped that his knock was heard by someone inside or he would likely die out here without the ability to defend himself. There was a creaking sound as the gate opened and a white haired elderly man peeked out at him.
"I require shelter…" Battousai managed to gasp, holding onto the wall for support, his good eye trained on the man.
The man eyed the red-haired swordsman with open suspicion and began to close the gate again.
"No…please…" Battousai's voice was not much more then a harsh whisper and a look of compassion crossed the old man's features, as Battousai moved into the light.
"Please…help…me…"
The old man, throwing caution to the winds, came out of the gate and took him by the arm, throwing it about his shoulders, taking the swordsman's weight off his injured leg. He carried Battousai inside the estate and left him on the ground just inside it before closing and locking the gate.
"Arigatou…" he whispered, his head bowed and his breathing labored.
"Yamashiro Haishi," elderly man said.
"Arigatou, Yamashiro-san." The world around him was spinning and the darkness once again hovered at the edge of his vision.
"And your name is…?" Yamashiro began.
"My…name…?" Battousai's heart clinched painfully and he looked up at
Yamashiro with confusion in his eye before that eye rolled up inside his head and he passed out.
*
He jerked suddenly awake several days later because of the sun's light shining in his eyes. His hand went reflexively to the sword that lay by his side and his amber eyes swept the room but he found that it was both unfamiliar and empty. His rapid breathing slowed and the adrinaline rush disappated. As it did so, he felt intense pain burning across his stomach. He hissed and wrapped an arm protectively around it noticing it was covered in bandages. A quick check of his other wounds turned up more bandages as well as a enough bruises to start a collection.
"Kuso! What happened to me?" He tried to remember but all he could see was fire and blood. There was nothing within his memories to help him out.
His amber eyes swept the room again and his hand strayed to his sword, his senses on high alert. Slowly, he attempted to stand and, after a few moments, he was able to get shakily to his feet. The room spun around him for a moment but he was able to force it to remain still. He looked around the room. It was small but clean and smelled new. There was a scroll on the wall, covered in kanji written in a delicate hand and he walked over to it, studying the characters and still trying to figure out what happened.
The door slid open and Battousai whipped around, his heart beating wildly and his sword in his hand before he had realized what had happened. Yamashiro stood perfectly still, looking at the sword that had been leveled at him so swiftly that he had not even seen the blade move and into the golden, fire-like gaze of the man who held it. Those eyes, full of raging amber fire, froze Yamashiro's heart and held his own imprisoned within their firy depths.
"He will kill me…" was Yamashiro's panicked thought as the seconds gave way to minutes and still the two stood facing each other in silence.
Battousai's chest was heaving, causing pain to shoot across it. Then he really noticed who was in the room with him.
"The man…from the other night…"
He felt his fingers release the sword, which fell to the floor with a clatter. He followed soon after, and sat on his knees, his chest still heaving, while his heart thudded in fear of what he had almost done. His hair was covering his face and his eyes were tightly closed.
"He helped me and I…I…"
Yamashiro entered the room and set a tray of food next to the young swordsman. "It's all right. You're not the first person who has drawn a sword on me."
"It was unforgivable. You have helped a complete stranger and I was going to reward your kindness by…" He let the sentence hang there incomplete.
Yamashiro waved his hand to brush aside his protests. "It's quite all right, I assure you. There have been worse things that have happened within my sight."
Battousai silenced his voice, gazing at the man intently, confusion in his burning gaze. Briefly, he wondered if this was a trap of some sort but he shook off that idea when he saw Yamashiro smile at him with no hint of anger or hatred. He bowed politely to the man as Yamashiro pushed the tray of food so that it was in front of him.
"You should try to eat something."
Battousai eyed the food and felt his stomach growl with hunger. He began to eat slowly, knowing that if he ate to quickly he would likely make himself sick. Yamashiro sat across from him, drinking tea and eyeing the young man before him, trying to place him. Something about him was tugging at his memory. A name…a description…?
"Who are you?" he asked after several minutes of near silece, that was punctuated by the sound of chopsticks scrapping against porceline.
Battousai stared at his food a moment and then looked up at Yamashiro, a look of confusion mixed with fear in his eyes as he tried to remember his name.
"I…I…can't remember." He looked away from his rescuer's face and back to his hands, which were fisted in his hakama so tightly that the knuckles of his fingers were nearly as white as the material of it.
"I see." Yamashiro studied what he could see of the young man's face, looking intently at the deep scar that disfigured the left cheek of the other man. "What is the last thing you remember before you found this place?"
The young swordsman shuddered as a jumble of images went though his mind. He saw himself set upon and surrounded by a group of men. They all seemed to be shouting a name at him but he couldn't catch it. Then his eyes widened as the image of a battle came to his mind.
He bowed his head, still shaking and whispered, "Tobu Fushimi…the battle at Tobu Fushimi. That is the last clear memory I have, everything else is a jumble."
Yamashiro's eyes widened at the mention of Tobu Fushimi but he said nothing, not wishing to speak of the battle that had claimed the life of his son, daughter-in-law and their young child. "I'm sure you will remember in time. You were hit pretty hard in the head. Sometimes injuries like that cause a person to forget things for a time."
"What if I don't remember who I am?" Battousai's voice was panicked.
"Well, you could stay here, for a while." Yamashiro's voice held compassion for the distraught young man.
"I will have to stay here for the moment in any case. I was staying somewhere nearby, I think, but at the moment I'm too injured to travel far."
Yamashiro nodded. "Rest for now and let your body heal. In time you might even remember what you have forgotten."
"I will do so," He paused for a moment. "But as soon as I have healed I must move on." Battousai felt that there was someone after him and again he experienced flashes of the past few years on the run from something.
"Then all is well, for now." Yamashiro rose and, after bowing to the young samurai, he left the room. As he slid the door shut again, he gave the red- haired swordsman an icy glare and he whispered, "Hitokiri Battousai."
*
For the next several days, Battousai was forced to keep to his bed, recovering from his wounds. Surprisingly, he gave Yamashiro little trouble over this, knowing that he wanted to heal as quickly as possible so that he could be on his way. During the time he spent in his borrowed room he tried desperately to remember his name and the events of the past few months. He knew he had been a soldier in the recent war, brief flashes of memory indicated this; though he could not remember what side he had fought for. There were also dark and haunting images of blood and sadness that played through his mind that he didn't understand the meaning of as well as the face of a beautiful woman with sad dark eyes. These images and memories came to him in no particular order, so he had no way of making any sense of them. His only clear memory was of Tobu Fushimi and it seemed to him that he had just left there, so vivid was that memory. He could still hear the screams of the dying and wounded and smell the acidic smoke that hung over the field, wreathing it in crimson flame. Before that everything seemed to be awash in pain and regret.
He locked those memories away to examine later and tried to make sense of the memories after that battle that he still had a grasp on, hoping they would be able to tell him who he was and how he had come to be here. After several day of examining these more recent memories he was no closer to finding out his identity then he had been when he started.
"Kuso!" he thought fiercly. "Why can't I remember anything about myself or my family?"
His hands clenched into fists at his sides but his face remained impassive as he stared out the open window. He was growing frustrated at his inability to remember anything and this feeling had him on edge. Somehow he knew he had to find out and soon. It was somehow important. If he could remember even just his name then he felt sure the rest would fall into place. He wasn't sure why he felt this way but his instincts were telling him that something was not quite right here. Battousai's hand strayed to his sword, which was another puzzle to him. This was not the same sword he had carried during the war. It's hilt felt strange to his hand, heavier somehow. Its weight felt strange to him and at the same time familiar.
"Why a sakabatou? What does this say about myself?" He pulled the sakabatou from its saya and looked at the shining blade closely. He had to admit that the workmanship and quality of the blade was as fine as any he had previously wielded but that still did not answer the question of why he carried such an unusual weapon.
Something tugged at the back of his mind, a foggy memory of an oath he'd sworn to…to whom? He closed his eyes to better concentrate on the dark and hazy memory but became no clearer. All he could remember was that it was an oath that meant more to him then life itself and something he would willing die to uphold. He concentrated some more and a memory flashed across his mind: a dark room, a woman's body laying in death and the echo of his own voice.
"I will never kill again…never again."
He felt the sting of tears on his cheeks and he opened his eyes, looking at the sakabatou again. Suddenly he remembered why he carried the unusual blade. He had taken many lives, including the life of the woman whose face haunted his dreams and whose name he could not remember. She was the only one who had been able to break his pattern of killing. She had loved him for who he was, not what he could do for her. He had sworn to protect her happiness and her. He knew he had somehow failed her and she had died because of him, for him.
"That is why I carry this sword now, to make sure I never make the same mistake again." He looked at the blade with a little more respect then he had in the last hour.
He slowly sheathed the sakabatou, watching it reflect the light coming from the open window. He caught his own reflection in it and looked for a moment at the scar on his cheek, reaching a hand up to trace its deep and unhealed lines. This scar was also a mystery to him. He turned to look out the window at the birds and the small pond in the garden outside of it; the air a warm breathe on his face and his thoughts swirling in his mind.
Cold eyes watched him from a nearby tree, the man's presence was carefully masked and his dark clothing concealing him from the unwanted attention of his target. An evil smile twisted the man's features and his eyes narrowed as he watched the swordsman at the window.
"So you cannot recall who you are? Well, before I am through, Hitokiri Battousai, you will remember every sin you have committed and you will pay for every life you have stolen a hundredfold.
*
Twenty miles upstream from Yamashiro's estate, Haishidiya reached the place where Kenshin had been attacked. He had been in search for the swordsman ever since recovering from the concussion he had received at the hands of the same bandits that had kidnapped Kenshin. For three days he had been searching for his friend using every trick he had learned in his samurai days, glad for the first time in years for the training his father had given him.
"He was attacked here by several men," he read the faint traces of battle left behind by the combatants, carefully following them downstream until he came to the place where the attackers had dropped Kenshin into the raging current of the river. There was no sign that he had struggled when they threw him in.
"Probably he was unconscious at the time." Haishidiya noticed the great quantity of blood scattered throughout the area and decided it was probably from Kenshin's stomach wound. "I have to find him and soon. Aizu is not a safe place for the one who was called the Hitokiri Battousai. There are many people here who lost family to the Ishinshishi during the war. They would seek him out to exact vengence."
Haishidiya shouldered his pack and began the long walk downstream, trusting that Buddah would guide his steps and lead him to his friend before it became to late.