Megumi sighed gloomily to herself as she went to work mending all of Sano's grungy clothes, a million things running through her mind as to how she could be spending her time. I could be at work, treating patients, for one thing, she thought frostily to herself, rather than patching up the bonehead's clothing while he's prancing around in that ridiculous Western frippery of a garment! But what was a decorous, well-educated lady trapped in a man's body to do, when everything said man had to wear boasted some kind of hole or another? While Sano seemed to have no problem running around with his shirt wide open, Megumi simply couldn't allow herself to go out in public with holes in her clothes. And that hair! That awful, hideous, absurdly stiff hair that always insisted on shooting straight up as though standing at attention like soldiers on the top of her head, no matter what the poor lady doctor did to try and smooth it down. The weight of all that hair, pulled rigidly up at the top of her head, automatically tilted it backwards, so that Megumi was forced to walk around as though a dead weight had been attached to her scalp. She'd seriously considered shaving Sano bald while she was in his body, if not for sweet revenge then at least so that her head wouldn't be permanently tilted at an angle, but she'd finally decided that as much as Sano would hate her for it, she would hate herself even more if she had to bear walking around in public while stuck in his body with a head as smooth and hairless as a duck egg.
So, Megumi endured: endured
as she patched up holes and stitched together tears, endured as she finally
managed to unwind those ridiculous bandages Sano had wrapped around his
torso (they were cutting off circulation to her lungs as much as a corset
would have cut off Sano's air had he been stupid enough to steal one along
with his crinoline from the American household), endured even as she'd
hastily sewn some buttons onto Sano's shirt so that she could cover her
chest and stomach while being relegated to wearing it in his body. But
the hair! The atrociously stiff hair! Even the almost always calm, cool,
and collected Megumi couldn't endure for long walking around with her head
sloped at an obtuse angle thanks to the weight of her hair pulling it backwards...which
was how she found herself at the Kamiya Dojo the day after that fateful
night when the Kenshin-gumi had discovered Sano in Megumi's body with his
skirt over his head and showing a disgraceful amount of leg. Too preoccupied
with trying to see at an upwards angle to notice where she was going, Megumi
wound up painfully bumping the entire left side of Sano's body right against
a pillar, letting out a startled yelp at the impact and automatically drawing
back.
"Ow," Megumi groaned to
herself, rubbing at her sore shoulder and silently cursing Sano for having
such a big, clumsy gait in addition to heavy and rigid hair that slanted
her head back and prevented her from seeing below the skyline.
"You've been drinking again,
haven't you?" a snidely amused masculine voice spoke up impudently, causing
Megumi to snap her head down at such a furiously swift speed that she nearly
gave herself whiplash. A pair of wide brown eyes looked up at her from
a swarthy, rascally little face crowned by a shock of coal-black hair,
causing Megumi to frown and irritably work out his name, not in the mood
to be heckled while being trapped in the body of a more or less grown-up
man with the maturity level of a two-year-old.
"Yahiko. Shouldn't you be
practicing your training or something?" she half-snapped in an uncharacteristically
testy voice, still rubbing her sore shoulder and beginning to see why Sano
and Kaoru always seemed on the verge of throttling the ten-year-old boy.
When Myojin Yahiko wanted to be annoying, he could really be a wretched,
sardonic little monster. Yahiko refused to grace her question with a reply,
crossing his arms knowingly in front of his chest and demanding, "All right,
Rooster Head, how much money did you gamble away this time?" Megumi
felt her eyebrows fly up in insulted outrage, as she hissed angrily, "Who
are you calling Rooster Head, little boy? In a few more years, your hair
will end up every bit as stiff and ridiculous as Sanosuke's!"
Yahiko began to spit back
a furious comeback, when he unexpectedly stopped, a confused expression
pushing away whatever anger still lingered as he wondered curiously, "Uh,
Sano? Just how drunk did you get last night?" Megumi paused, bewildered
by his words...before she realized that she'd slipped up and accidentally
referred to Sanosuke in the third person while she was still in his body.
"I, uh, always refer to
myself by my own name," she improvised lamely with a sweatdrop, then cleared
her throat and harrumphed in an effort to compensate for her mistake, "After
all, I'm Sagara Sanosuke--where did you get the idea that I--er, Sanosuke--knows
anything even resembling good grammar?" Yahiko shrugged, discreetly beginning
to edge away from Megumi while mentally making a note to harass Kenshin
into chaperoning Sanosuke the next time the ex-gangster went drinking with
his shoddy-looking friends.
"Either way, I--Sanosuke--didn't
come here to visit you," Megumi hastily plunged on. "Where's Kaoru?" Yahiko
shrugged absently.
"She's...somewhere...I don't
know, actually, I was just hiding out from her because she's making me
scrub the toilets, can you believe her?" he disclosed, a whining tone finding
its way to his voice as he admitted why he'd been forced to take flight
from the master of the dojo.
As Megumi rolled her eyes in his direction and silently tucked away this little piece of blackmail against the young boy, a feminine voice floated in from the woods behind the dojo, calling out almost cheerfully, "Oh, Yahiko! Don't forget you still have to wash all the dishes, do the laundry, dust the furniture, scrub the floor, and go into town to buy all next week's groceries after you're done cleaning out the toilets!" Yahiko's eyes widened into coffee-colored rice bowls, before he quickly squeaked out in a strangled voice, "Eep! I have to go now, don't tell Kaoru I was here, Sanosuke!" And he took off in a flash of dust and dirt, mumbling a string of words under his breath that sounded suspiciously obscene to Megumi's ears.
The elegant lady doctor never
had time to ponder Yahiko's degenerating vocabulary, when Kamiya Kaoru
emerged into view, a wide smile of greeting lighting up her face when she
recognized Megumi-as-Sanosuke standing by the entrance of her dojo.
"Oh, hi, Sano," the eighteen-year-old
girl spoke up in a friendly voice. "You're up early for a change. Don't
you usually sleep in until three in the afternoon?" Megumi ignored the
teasing tone in her voice, asking anxiously, "Listen, Kaoru, I just stopped
by to ask you if you've seen Sano--erm, I mean, me--erm, I mean, Megumi."
Kaoru gave her a strange look, but thankfully attributed "Sano's" strange
behavior to "his" near-drowning experience the previous night, and replied
nonchalantly, "Actually, it's funny that you asked, Sano, because Megumi
was here less than fifteen minutes ago."
Megumi perked up at those
words.
"He was?" she burst forth
eagerly, then at Kaoru's weird look, quickly corrected herself with a hasty,
"I mean, she was?" Kaoru shrugged and nodded, adjusting the sleeves
of her kimono as she added, "Yes, and behaving most oddly. You wouldn't
believe her language, Sano--it's almost like she turned into you this morning.
Just how many curse words are there, anyway?" Megumi smarted and
bristled, mentally swearing to rip Sanosuke's head off for finding with
so little effort all these little ways to tarnish her respectable reputation.
"What did he--she--want?"
she asked after she'd calmed down, forcing a neutral tone into her voice.
"She actually wanted to
know where you would be, can you believe that?" Kaoru replied. "Something
about how she couldn't endure any more sights of, ah, childbirth--or at
least that's what I think she was insinuating. It was hard to decipher
what she meant by all those, ahem, rough words about babies popping out
and something I really wouldn't care to ever hear again." Even the tomboyish,
unfussy Kaoru blushed furiously as she quoted "Megumi," causing the real
lady doctor to turn bright crimson in her rage.
"They must have been medical
terms, I'm sure you just misunderstood her," Megumi muttered in an effort
to do some damage control.
Kaoru shrugged, then added
casually as she picked up a broom and began to sweep the dojo steps, "And
then Megumi left, I guess for the clinic, after I'd helped stitch in the
waistline of her Western dress--something about how fat the original waistline
made her look, the way the top of the dress just sort of flapped around
limply around her." Megumi scowled.
"I don't think it's the
dress that's making him look fat," she grumbled under her breath. "His
waist is as big as a cow's, and it only looks heftier crowded into that
mountain of a frock!" Kaoru shot her a look, curious at her sudden cattiness,
but for once refrained from voicing her opinion loud and clear, and instead
made way as Megumi stormed past her, seething and looking for blood.
"You're going to the clinic
then, Sanosuke?" the younger girl called after her. Megumi failed to turn
around, only continued walking with grim determination as she muttered
darkly under her breath, "Definitely." She didn't even notice the sudden
smug smirk that came over Kaoru's features, as she snickered to herself
about opposites--real, real opposites--attracting.
Near Dr. Genzai's Clinic...
Sanosuke groaned in dismay,
turning around and tugging violently at the wide, spreading skirts of the
Western dress he'd stolen from the American household while he'd been "presiding"
over its mistress's childbirth.
"Come on, damn you," he
cursed grumpily, ignoring the snickers of the children and poorly concealed
looks of mirth from passers-by as they gawked at the rather comical sight
of a tall, statuesque raven-haired beauty decked out in ill-fitting pink
hoop skirts and lodged firmly in a doorway.
"Move! Argh!" A highly unladylike
stream of curses continued to fall from Sano's lips, as he wriggled desperately
about inside the voluminous hoop skirts in an effort do unclog himself
from the entranceway. His vehement movements caused the spreading skirts
to swirl and dance like silky pink bells, causing him to unwittingly attract
a horde of eager young men who stopped dead in their tracks and gawked,
entranced and unashamed, at the alluringly swaying hips of the beautiful
lady doctor.
"Why won't you budge!" Sano
howled in frustrated outrage at his Western dress, before resolutely deciding
that he had no other choice but to further humiliate Megumi's body in public.
Bending down, he lifted the skirts all the way up to his waist and carefully
started inching his way through the doorway. Meanwhile, all around him,
several men's eyes goggled at the alien but extremely pleasing view, before
their owners fainted and collapsed in unsightly heaps onto the ground,
much to the disgust of the women on the streets, who immediately clustered
together and began heatedly whispering that Dr. Takani was a brazen hussy.
Sano was barely free from
one impending catastrophe when he bumped right into another, as the real
Megumi glared daggers at the sheepish ex-Sekihou Tai member, before beginning
to screech furiously in a voice so loud, Sano's hair was practically blown
from his face.
"You bonehead! Are you deliberately
trying to destroy my reputation?!" the frazzled doctor wailed, nearly throttling
him in her fury. Sano gulped nervously, before raising his hands protectively
over his face and squeaking out the same excuse he'd been using ever since
last night.
"Listen, Fox Lady, I can
explain everything," he whimpered, looking like he might drop down to his
knees and kiss her feet if she ordered him to. "Honestly, I can! It's not
what you think! Honestly, it isn't!"