Warning: This is a fusion of Rurouni Kenshin, Vivian Vande Velde's Dragon's Bait and several other dragon and maiden books and movies. If you don't like, don't read.
Disclaimer: I do not own Rurouni Kenshin. I also do not own Vivian Vande Velde's Dragon's Bait, Patricia C Wrede's Dealing with Dragon's and it's many sequels, Dragonheart, Dragonslayer, any fairy tales that may pop up or the dragon and princess book that I read in grade four that I no longer remember the name of (Although it may or may not have been called 'The Dragon's Princess'). In other words if you recognize it (and possibly even if you don't) then I don't own it. So live with it, because I do. RK and the other stories are the property of their respective owners. I'm just writing this for fun (it's fanfiction, it's supposed to be fun) and will make no money from it. Please do not sue me. You really wouldn't get anything anyway.
Summary: Kaoru is the Maiden, guess who the Dragon is.
The Dragon and the Maiden
By Colleen
Part Three
The Maiden
Kaoru ate quickly and crawled into the futons. Exhausted from the events of the day she fell asleep so fast she didn't even have a chance to notice the musty nature of the bedding she lay upon.
Unfortunately sleep deserted her a few hours later when her abuse body decided to let her know just what it thought of being tied to a stake for most of a day. Her muscles were on fire, each of them feeling like separate threads pulled too tight on a loom. However this was nothing compared to the bands of pain that circled each of her wrists. The ropes she had been tied with and had struggled against had rubbed them raw and they now throbbed in time with her heartbeat. She'd cleaned the wounds in the waterfall last night but they really should have been treated and bandaged.
She tried to ignore them but her few hours of sleep had taken the edge off of her fatigue. She tossed and turned and tried to tell herself that her wrists couldn't possibly be swelling up as much as she thought they were. Finally she gave into the pain and got up to see if there were any first aid supplies.
Kaoru lit a candle from the embers of the fire that must have been used to cook the food she'd eaten and searched the small, off to the side area that was obviously used as a kitchen. There were a few pots and pans along with a barrel of rice and other supplies for cooking but nothing that she could use to clean and treat her wrists. They, she noticed when she studied them in the candle's light, looked even worse than they felt. She spread out to the rest of the living area searching everywhere. She even, after a few moments indecision, searched the chest that sat behind the dividing screen. It was the only place other than the kitchen that held any hope of having the items she needed.
She opened the trunk and pulled out what appeared to be two sections of folded cloth. She shook one of them out and then blushed when she realized she was holding the pair of hakama the dragon had been wearing earlier. The memory of him naked before her caused that blush to deepen and she diligently tried to stuff the thought away. Her mind however had other ideas. Instead reminding her of how afraid she'd been at that moment it instead centred on how beautiful he had appeared nude. She grit her teeth and locked the memory away, refusing to let her traitorous mind continue. She didn't want to remember how something in her had responded to his beauty and the heat of his body when he'd leaned over her. She quickly refolded the pants (not an easy thing to do) and placed them aside with what she now knew was his gi.
She looked into the bottom of the trunk and gasped. He'd left his sword. She lifted it out of the trunk and looked at it curiously. Why would a dragon use a sword? She put her hand on the hilt and considered drawing the blade, thoughts of taking the weapon and using it to defend herself as she escaped flashing through her mind.
She snorted at the daydream and put the sword back where she'd found it. She would be lucky not to cut off her own foot with the thing much less use it to fight. She piled the clothing back on top and closed the lid.
Kaoru picked up one of the paper lanterns that lined the walls, placed her candle inside it and grabbed a short stick that was notched so that the light could hang on one end while she held onto the other. She left her quarters and started walking into the deeper caves, looking for where the dragon slept. He must, she gathered, keep the medicine box in his rooms. After all he had asked her earlier if she needed medicine so that should mean he had some.
She knew he had told her to call if she needed anything but having him come all the way out here just to have to go back should he have the needed supplies seemed a waste of time. Besides, something in her rebelled at the thought of yelling for help.
Thankfully it turned out that it wasn't very hard to follow him. Even by the feeble light of the paper lantern she carried she could make out footprints here and there where the dragon's human form had stepped into the drifts of dirt and dust that covered the cavern's floor. The ground also became progressively more sandy the further she went and the footprints became easier to see as there was no longer any rock that would hide their passage.
As she walked she slowly became aware of a sound that was growing in volume the further into the caves she went. She wondered if there was another exit at the back of the cavern, as she was sure it was the wind. It was blowing back and forward across some opening in the distance and it sounded as if a storm must have come up while she was sleeping.
By the time she came upon his white yukata and obi crunched up into a ball on the sandy ground the sound was almost deafening. Frowning, she put down her lantern and picked up the robe and belt.
She had shaken the sand out of them and folded them properly before the significance of them being there hit her. He was sleeping in the nude.
That thought almost convinced her to leave (otherwise know as bolt for safety). If her wrists hadn't been as bad as they were she would have. She was quite capable of ignoring the pain however the danger of infection if they were not soon treated was very real. So, still holding on the yukata with her left arm she picked up the lantern with her right and continued forward.
Three steps.
Here the footsteps she had been following changed. They went from a nicely formed human foot to something claw like that was almost as long as she was tall. Kaoru's mouth open in a small shocked 'o' at this discovery and she raised the lantern higher, towards the sound of the wind.
The light bounced off of scale, their colours shifting from green to purple as the dragon moved slightly with its' breathing. The red markings she had remembered from a distance were actually made up of a mane, which ran from the top of its' head and down its' back and a large scar on the left side of the dragon's 'face'. This no doubt translated to the red hair and cross-shaped scar he had in human form.
She couldn't believe what an idiot she was, expecting him to sleep in the shape of a man. She had forgotten, in a way, that he wasn't human at all. He was instead a dragon who occasionally pretended to be one. At least now she understood two things he had said earlier that hadn't made much sense. If he always slept like this than only one futon would seem rather small to him. Heck two of the beds together wouldn't even hold a quarter of him. That and 'I do not have anything large enough to sleep in.' She looked down at the yukata, then back at the dragon and briefly tried to calculate the amount of cloth it would take to create a robe for him. The obi alone would take a staggering amount of material.
It occurred to her then that she might be in shock. It was the only reason she could see for standing there mentally sewing clothing for the creature when she should be hightailing it back to the relative safety of the smaller caves.
Kaoru carefully backed away from the sleeping dragon. She stopped for a moment to set his yukata down where he had left it. Then, keeping her eyes firmly on the beast, she continued to move backwards.
She should have watched her feet instead.
The sand under her left foot collapsed and with a small cry Kaoru found herself falling over for the third time that day. She dropped the lantern as she fell. The light didn't go out, instead the flame inside it caught at the paper causing it to burn in a shadow inducing frenzy. As soon as the fire finished eating the paper she would be in the dark.
With a dragon she had just woken up.
Kaoru was suddenly reminded of the old saying that recommended letting sleeping dragons lie. It was good advice as dragons, like people, were prone to reacting with out thinking when woken to possible danger. For a creature that tended to be as hunted as he must be that meant attacking.
The dragon let out a roar and swiped at her. Kaoru was frozen in fear until its' claws gouged out the ground in front of her, missing her by a hairs breath. Then she was up and running, fear and instinct guiding her through the dark caves now that she had no light to see by.
Behind her she heard the dragon roar again and start after her, its' footsteps sounding like cannon fire behind her.
The terror and the adrenalin rush those footsteps induced let her forget her screaming muscles and for once this night her luck held to the good. She was able to stay at a dead run and not trip over or run into anything.
She really wasn't thinking, wasn't realizing that even if she got out of the caves she had nowhere to go, nowhere she could hide. All she could think about at that moment was that she had to get out. If she'd had farther to run then she might have let common sense catch up to her but she could see the opening to the cave just a little ways away. Sunrise, or at least the promise of it, must have lightened the sky and to her the patch of pale air meant freedom.
She hadn't noticed that she could no longer hear the dragon coming after her.
A few steps away from the cave's exit arms grabbed her and threw her to the ground. The dragon, now once again human stood over her breathing hard, although not as hard as she was. Her panic-stricken mind noticed that his eyes were once again a glowing yellow and he was wearing the wrinkled yukata.
She didn't think she could get much more afraid but she was wrong. His eyes were terrifying but somehow him being dressed and human was worse. He had actually gone back, changed, put on the robe and obi and still had time to catch her before she made it out of the caves. He hadn't even had to try very hard.
"What the hell do you think you were doing?" He asked her. Anger written on his face he reached down and grabbed her by her wrists to pull her to her feet.
She screamed.
In her fright she had almost forgotten about her wrists. His tight grip on them was a brutal reminder. Her mind, overloaded on the sensation of pain and combined with her exhaustion and fear, shut down. She gratefully fell into a deeper darkness and passed out in his arms.
The Dragon
When Kaoru ran from him the dragon roared out her name and gave chase, shifting to human as he moved. Pretty much without thinking he made a sudden u-turn and grabbed his yukata and obi and continued running after her while struggling into the robe and tying it shut. It seemed silly to go back for it but things seemed bad enough without adding the whole naked thing to it again.
Why had she come into the deeper caves? He had told her to call for help if she needed it. Instead the stupid girl had come hunting him through the dark. She was lucky not to be dead.
His anger built as he ran and the distance he had to chase her didn't help to cool it. He had expected the girl to trip or run into something and thereby end this race. Instead she defied the laws of probability and ran full out for the exit as if it were as bright as daylight in the caves instead of a darkness that must be impenetrable to her.
If he'd had the time to think he would have realized that most of his anger was at how close he had come to hurting her. He had aimed to miss, he always did when woken that way, but given his half-awake state he had come closer to hitting her than he'd intended. Just a bit more off and Kaoru would have been little more than a bloody smear soaking into the sand.
When he finally caught up to her he threw her to the ground, not to hurt her, rather to stop her forward motion. His anger was riding him however and as he demanded to know what she thought she was doing he grabbed none to gently at her wrists and pulled her to her feet.
And then his anger shattered and sliced into his soul at her scream.
There was fear in the cry and he had expected that, what he hadn't expected was pain.
The girl went limp in his arms and he caught her up, carrying her at a near run into the living area. He laid her out on the futons and quickly lit a couple of the lanterns so he could see better.
Since the only thing he had been touching when she'd screamed had been her wrists he looked at them first. What he saw made him suck in his breath in shock. The ropes she had been tied with had striped most of the flesh from them and the area was now red and swollen. He felt her face and hissed a little at how warm she was. True she had just been running but it was fairly obvious that she also had a fever.
What should he do?
Even though he had asked her if she needed medicine he didn't actually have any. If she'd said yes earlier he would have gotten her some but he'd expected her to know what she would need. If he couldn't ask her he would have to ask someone else and the only person he knew to ask or even to get the stuff from was his godfather.
Should he take her with him? Gently, he touched her face again. The fever wasn't too bad and her heartbeat and breathing were steady but that could easily change. The trip there wouldn't be long but he would have to fly higher into the mountains and the cold air and the change in altitude wouldn't help her any. Best to leave her here then and be quick enough to get back before she woke.
He left her covered up on the futons with a cup of water beside her and a cold cloth on her forehead. Then he ran to the chest and grabbed his clothing and sword, tying them into a bundle that he could carry while flying. He took one more look at the girl then moved out of the caves and shifted form before taking to the sky.
As the dragon flies his destination was close. Actually he had been visiting his godfather shortly before the first time he had seen Kaoru, otherwise he would never have been anywhere near a village. The wizard lived at the peak of the tallest mountain in the area but it still only took him about twenty minutes to get there.
The man's home consisted of a centre building, which is where the he lived, and a series of wings that branched out from the main structure. The dragon himself hadn't been out of the main house and he knew that his godfather never entered any of the other sections without a great deal of preparation. When he did go in he would be gone for days and often came out looking worn and tattered.
He'd decided long ago that he really didn't want to know what was in those other rooms.
He just prayed that the wizard wasn't in one of them now. He didn't have time to wait for him to come out.
The dragon landed at the front of the house and shifted form once again. He ran into the house, carrying his bundle of clothing. His godfather, thank the gods, was sitting at his desk going over some papers.
"I need medicine," was the first thing out of the redheads mouth.
"And good morning to you too baka deshi."
End of Part Three
Note: Well I doubt that was a surprise to anyone.
Authors note: I had already written (but not posted) the maiden section of this chapter before the second chapter of Linay's 'Broken Pieces' came out. Because they are both chase scenes it reminded me of what I had already written, so I just wanted to say that if anyone else feels the same that it is a complete coincidence. Also Linay's Kaoru kicks butt so if you haven't read her story yet you should.