Note: In this chapter you have the long-awaited confrontation. Sigh...things normally don´t happen as they´re meant to. Thanks to all my reviewers and to Margit for beta and for suggesting aggressive and unpronuntiable names for Prussian noblewomen. ;)
EclipseChapter Five: Forgiveness
Dawn found a lonely, haggard looking figure sitting under the porch of the house. His eyes, heavy from lack of sleep, were kept fixed on the rosy and glowing haze of the horizon, and his only movements were to shiver imperceptibly whenever his body was touched by the humidity of the dew. He was back home, and those damp smells and sounds were the ones he had felt and heard since he had been born… but now, not much to his surprise, the only feeling they brought to him was a dreadful inner turmoil, and the instinctive urge to get up and leave.
To escape…
A soft, heavy smell reached his nostrils, and he felt the planks of wood crack a bit behind his back. Not wanting to turn back and show the black circles under his eyes, he strengthened his grip on his knees and curled his body a bit more, almost defensively.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. His voice came out with a shocking hoarse stridency, so, ashamed, he fell silent again.
"I know," his mother answered. Birds were singing in the trees that grew along the way, behind the wall. "But I wanted to speak with you."
Kenji repressed a sigh, and moved a bit to his right to leave space for her. As she took the cue and sat down, her inevitable, motherly gasp did not take too much time to come.
"Kenji!" she cried, putting an arm around his shoulder. "You…you look as if you hadn't slept in all night!"
"You, too." he retorted ruefully. "I…"
"Don't say anything," she stopped him. Her eyes took a dim, sorrowful colour, and she let them wander slowly over the ground under the porch. "Yesterday night I was sick, worried and tired. What I said… I need you to know for sure that the… implications you might have drawn from it are not true."
Kenji gave a long sigh.
"I left you, too. You were right."
"You're not responsible for me," Kaoru replied, heightening the tone of her voice. "You were in the age and the situation in which anyone should have the opportunity of going away and learn a bit about himself. You needed to go. As for me… I was only being consequent with my choices when I decided this."
"Choices…?" Kenji asked. He felt emotionally drained after rolling on his futon and sitting there for all night, and, for a moment, he felt as if, somehow, he was not even able to feel things with the intensity with which he had used to feel them before. It was almost as if he was floating in a cloud of exhaustion. "Which choices? To turn your life into a continuous suffering? And this process started when? When you married him?"
"My choice was to share my life with him and understand his pain," she replied patiently.
Her son shook his head.
"Say what you may, I left you. Since Father got ill, I had been coming here only when he came, and when he left definitely, I did so, too." Pain started at last to creep inside his gut, but he ignored it stoically and with pride. "I'm an adult now, and I've reached the… conclusion that, after that, I can't blame you for leaving me. But it grieves me to see you with this… hopeless attitude that's so unlike you, as I used to know you." His voice darkened with a suppressed emotion. "And I…"
Kaoru frowned, before she rushed to interrupt him.
"Leaving you? What sort of words are these?" she exclaimed, straightening her back. "I am not going anywhere, Kenji. If you leave me, on the other hand… it's your choice."
"My father said the same," he answered bitterly. "Not even three years ago."
"It was different." The woman then started a strenuous effort to struggle to her feet, and Kenji found himself lending her a hand out of instinct. "Megumi says that the normal thing in this case is to live from ten to thirty years. Your father was left in a very bad state by the sword technique he practiced. The speed with which the disease spread through his body… - couldn't be more unusual, as if it was welcome by a tired soul who wanted to rest. But, in spite of this, he continued to push himself to the edge to do more, more and more, before he was forced to stop by a greater power. In the end… all his life was reduced to this battle."
"He had to do more before he died, but his death came nearer through his efforts," Kenji summed up, in a carefully neutral tone. He did not know why, Hiko's voice came back to his mind at unawares.
When I met him, he had buried dozens of corpses alone, with his own hands. That was what he saw when he learned kenjutsu, and that was also what he saw when he left for China last year…
"That's…madness," he exclaimed, though his resolve wavered at the final syllables. Was he, perhaps, going mad too?
"It's unfair," she muttered, as if only to herself. "His scar has not faded, and it won't ever fade… in spite of everything he has done."
"Maybe… he got something wrong?"
"Uh?"
Kenji got up like his mother and stood at her side, repressing a shiver as he realised what he had just said. The talk was giving him the creeps. Once more, everything that should look natural from the outside was unbelievably twisted and turned inside this house, and what for the rest of the world would be the crazed imaginations of madmen were powerful forces that caused the death of people. And, what was still worse… for him, it was either drowning in those same waters or being a stranger among his own family.
"Maybe… maybe the best atonement would have been to lead a normal life and avoid tangling other people in his cobweb of insanity," he said in a hoarse voice. "Maybe he even has other things to atone for now because of this."
Kaoru looked down, and sighed deeply. After a while spent in apparent meditation, she lifted her eyes, and locked her gaze into his.
How tired she looked…
"He couldn't lead a normal life, Kenji, even if he tried," she explained in a patient voice. "He didn't want anybody to be involved, either. Maybe you will understand this one day."
"In any case, he has made people unhappy. And no good reason will erase this," her son snapped. Then, however, he softened his tone a bit, and arranged her almost fallen haori over her shoulders. "And I, too. In the end, I... I suppose I did myself what I hated most about him without even noticing. Forgive me."
Kaoru smiled sadly, and pulled him into a brief embrace.
"Come on." she muttered. "It's time to wake him up."
"I warn you… the time when he wakes up is his worst moment. After a prolonged sleep, his brain is very confused. Don't take his state now as…definitive."
The light in the room was scarce, in spite of the increasing glow of the sun outside. Kenji stepped inside carefully, following Kaoru's footsteps and paying a distracted ear to her advertences, until a heavy scent reached his nostrils and made him stop dead in his tracks. It was the scent of hospitals that reigned in that secluded space, of disease and decay, increased more than overshadowed by a lavish dose of flower scent. It penetrated his respiratory conducts whatever he did to shut them, and for a first moment he had to make a great effort not to gag.
"Oh, no. He bled all over the sheets again," Kaoru murmured, kneeling at the side of the futon. Kenji ordered his feet to bring him there, at her side, but he found that they didn't want to.
He hadn't been prepared for this.
Kenshin's body was lying flat on the bed, one arm clutching his chest in a desperate grip and the other, completely covered by bloodied bandages, slung over his face to prevent the light of the morning from reaching his eyes. That blood had smeared the sheets too, during the night, and as Kaoru started pulling the arm away between caresses and soft calls, Kenji could see that it had smeared the face as well.
"Kenshin, wake up. It's morning already. Wake up…."
The young man watched, half in horror and half in fascination, how the pale, bony figure opened a pair of eyes of a waned violet shade, and let them wander for a long time in helpless confusion about his surroundings. He looked frightened and tried to move his body violently, as if being surprised by another person was still engraved in his mind as something dangerous, and, feeling his body chained and unable to react in time, his anxiety augmented even more. Little by little, though, Kaoru's persistent reassurance made an effect, and he started to relax.
"Kaoru…dono," he muttered in recognition. His wife nodded with a smile, before turning towards Kenji.
"Give me the bandages, please," she asked. "They're in the box of the corner. And then, go to the kitchen and fill a bucket of water."
The young man set into motion mechanically, and walked away to do her bidding without even thinking twice. He felt numb, annihilated by the nights he had spent brooding as he fell more and more down the precipice, and, now that he had hit the ground at last, his decisions, his hopes, his good and his bad feelings were lying scattered on it, crushed by the weight of reality.
He had been told that his father was in a sore state, yes. He knew it… and his mind should have extracted its conclusions as he headed home to talk with him for the last time. But in no moment he had foreseen this, the sordid concreteness of his father's suffering, his state….
His degradation…
As a distant memory, he remembered one of the last conversations his father and he had held together. He had questioned his father's absences and accused him of not caring about his mother (1), and among the explanations that followed, Kenshin had told him that he could not even imagine the despair and desolation of the people he cared for. After this, he remembered too, he had tried to imagine… what had he imagined?
Nothing. He could not even imagine, as his father had said. And now… now he had come here to realise that he could only see.
"Here you are," he whispered to his mother, handing her what she had requested. The woman, who had already removed part of the bandages, now covered the worst part with a blanket so Kenji couldn't see the most grievous ravages of his father's skin, but the young man wasn't even looking in that direction. It was in Kenshin's eyes, ashamedly looking in other direction as his wife worked on him, where his attention had been fixed since the very first moment. His unhealthy looks, the blood, the stench even, were minor causes of the horror slowly creeping into his sleepy mind. The true horror was only written in his eyes, in the loss of his dignity. Kenji remembered his father as someone fiercely independent who didn't allow people to do anything for him, and now, unable even to take care of himself, he was forced to stay there, sitting quietly while others saw the marks of his shame.
"Thank you, Kaoru-dono."
The young man felt his stomach twist inside him, and turned away to leave the room, the house, the city, and return to Kyoto again. He didn't hate his father anymore. He didn't even need to talk with him. He was ready to swallow all his accusations, if they only would let him be out of this before he lost his sanity. He could not stand it any longer…
"Kenji? Is it…you?"
Feeling all his hopes sink to his feet, Kenji froze in his tracks at the sound of the feeble voice. As he willed himself to turn back, he could see his mother diligently stepping aside after she had taken away the last bandages, and his father's eyes fixed on him with a clouded expression of disbelief that soon turned into joy.
"Kenji…," he muttered, struggling to get up in his bliss. Just in time, however, he seemed to remember about his exposed, bleeding body, and he crumpled back to curl under the blanket with a forlorn expression. "I'm sorry."
Kenji's heart wrenched.
You will be forever the fool who is unable to keep to his own decisions.
Everybody always had to pity him. Everybody, even you.
He went away without even saying goodbye.
He never cared for me!
Kaoru got up in silence, and took the bucket in her hands while muttering something about the bathhouse being the best option. Kenji didn't even see her, struggling as he was to prevent the flow of his tears. His father took his hand, and he had to cringe at the hot touch while pity and shocked compassion invaded his heart in cascades.
That was not what he had steeled himself against. Never. His calculations had all failed strenuously. What he had been prepared to fight had been his father's aura of wisdom and experience, the piercing glance that robbed him of his argumentations as he made him see, point by point, how childish and selfish it was to prevent his departures, and how little did he know about life and the people who suffered. It was his influence on all the people who surrounded him, even Kenji's own mother, impossible to break even after the attempts of many years.
It was the quiet authority in his tone, never giving in, never flinching in his convictions, never feeling as if he had to, and never, ever, asking for excuses…
"Kenji, forgive me."
The boy stiffened, and felt his legs failing him in the first instants of raw denial. It could not be true. He had not heard that.
It had to be an error.
Kenji fell on his knees at his father's side, and noticed that the man was trembling, his eyes more glassy than ever. Great, he tried to tell himself to snap away from his state of shock, and now he had lost it. That was exactly what the situation had been lacking.
"Those people… I killed them, Kenji!" he whispered. "When I asked for their forgiveness, they were dead. And they won't hear me… never ever…."
There was such anguish, such a frantic urge in his voice that his son stayed quiet, afraid to breathe. It was shortly after when he realised that he was just being asked forgiveness for the death of people he hadn't ever met. Was this his father's brain decay speaking? Had he definitely gone mad?
Or was this what he had always felt, hidden behind that composure he had lost?
For a moment, Kenji pictured himself towering over that pitiful figure, accusing him of the wrongs he had committed against him while his target didn't even hear what he was saying, tortured by the images of the corpses he hadn't been able to save and the remembrances they had brought of those others that he had killed himself with his own hands. Only seeing that he was angry, and that he did not forgive him. Because, he saw it clearly for the first time, and as much as it hurt his selfish, little soul, all his father needed now was the forgiveness of someone.
The young man's cheeks reddened and he felt a surge of shame at himself as he imagined the ridiculous situation. Damn him!. He had been defeated again. While he thought his position was growing stronger, it had only been growing weaker… and now, terrible realisation, there was only one option left for him anymore.
If there ever had been any other.
"I… I forgive you, Father."
The words came from his mouth with a great effort, hoarse from the knot that he had in his throat. He could see Kenshin smile, and allowed himself to be swept in his embrace with pity and repugnance, love and hate battling in his heart. A horrible smell invaded his nostrils when he buried his face in his dishevelled red locks, and he felt his clothes getting wet with blood as they had got wet with water the last time they had got close to each other.
"I can… die," he heard his father's relieved voice mutter next to his ear. "At last… Maybe they'll listen now."
Unable to continue keeping them for himself, Kenji's emotions gave in, and his body was wrecked by the long repressed sobs.
"No! Not yet," he pleaded in a shaky tone, surprising even himself with his words. "Don't leave yet! You promised... you promised you would be here on my birthday. The last one. Please… don't leave yet."
The sick man's limbs stiffened, and his eyes got lost in the distance while he distractedly caressed his son's back.
I was the one who chose it. I am the one you should hate.
Great.
Yahiko repressed a grumble, and continued walking in a stormy stride through the Tokyo streets. He was vaguely aware that some people were staring at him because of the way he carried himself, and that his inner repression had come just in time before he had kicked a pile of daikon that had suddenly appeared in front of him when he was crossing the market. On top of this, he had patches under his eyes, since he hadn't slept at all that night.
And who would?
So that was the secret she had been hiding for so long. The reason why she didn't hang around the dojo anymore and why each moment found her thinner and paler. He had always thought that all this only had to do with Kenshin, but not in the mad way in which his assumption had finally happened to come true. Who would have thought anything like that, anyway?
She's mad. Mad. And she fooled me into believing she was sane.
Now, he felt very much like the idiot whose role was simply to lean back and watch how everything happened, sometimes getting in the middle and making things even worse because of his ignorance. He had played the idiot convincing Kenji to come back home to find a dying father and a mad mother, who had merrily announced to him that she was doomed to die, too, as soon as he had entered her gates. And all his efforts thrown down the gutter.
All his hopes thrown down the gutter.
"But why the heck did she have to do something like this to us?" he couldn't help but cry out aloud. A pair of passers-by that were crossing the street at his side in that moment directed their puzzled glances towards him. He glared back at them, and they promptly started to look elsewhere and to mind their business.
He admitted that she hadn't been much the cheerful, feisty and - he had to admit it - strong woman he had known once of late, and that since Kenshin had left, she had become rather subdued. He admitted, too, that the misfortunes of these last three years had taken their toll on her. But he had never given much importance to her moods, and dismissed even Tsubame's worries about the subject. He needed her to be well. She was always the woman who took things bravely and smiled back, and when he was afraid he wouldn't be able to do the same, he followed her example. If she could smile after knowing that Kenshin was going to die, how could he let himself be swept away by despair?
It was now and only now, that he was able to get the truth, and realise that her smile had been the same as Kenshin's smile in the first months in which they had known the red-haired swordsman. A mask that hid the depths of her insanity. She had been insane; for how would a sane person have done what she had? It was all senseless. Senseless suffering. Senseless death…
Did she feel happy now?
In his talk with Megumi last night, the doctor had told him that Kaoru's body could even stand the disease for thirty years; if her body won the first struggle, it could adopt a hidden form for many more. But Yahiko was not even sure about her will to win that struggle at all. Whenever he saw again in his mind that eerie smile on her face last night, as she had been talking to Kenji about the time that remained to her, and he imagined the many eerie smiles she would have smiled for himself in her long nights, alone in her house….he wanted to crawl off his skin.
And when they're both dead, I'll have to take care of everything. Of the dojo, of the funeral,of their messed up son. Oh, of course, I'm always here for all they need…
Even when they're dead…
Yahiko's face was the grimmest of the whole of Tokyo, as he strolled down one of its main avenues in the direction of the door of Yutaro's house. Unlike Kenji, he understood Kenshin rather well, or he thought he did. In reality, he could hold nothing against his mad search for atonement, and he had had many more glimpses on the importance of the subject than what Kenji ever would. He had also used to understand Kaoru, known when he could insult her or when he would end with a lump in his head, got to admire her qualities and, above all, acquired the unbreakable conviction that she loved Kenshin more than anyone or anything in the world, in such an exaggerated way that her dead father, her dead mother, Kenji, him or anybody else wouldn't ever be anything at his side. Yes, as shocking as it sounded. She would do anything for her love, whatever it was, this he had known too…but just around there, there had been things that had begun to escape his knowledge and understanding. Had she destroyed herself for his sake? To make him happy? To save him? Or just to emulate him, to be like him after a twisted net of thought processes that he wasn't sure he ever wanted to know about? Since when had everything else ceased to matter to her?
Since when had she turned into that smiling stranger whose behaviour would scare the girl who once had run behind him hitting his head with a bokken out of her wits?
Not for the first time, he remembered that day of the Kyoto battle, when Misao and he had been at each other's throats on the roof of the Aoiya because he had mocked her for loving someone like Aoshi. The old man, Okina, had said that he was still too young to understand love, and that the most beautiful thing of that force was its ability to adopt infinite particular forms. He had laughed at this at the time, but later he had found himself thinking too much about it. It had helped him not only to get why Misao could love the Oniwabanshuu weirdo, but also other things like how Tomoe-san could have loved Kenshin, and - of course! - how someone like Kenshin could love such an unwomanly, brutal and clumsy woman as Kaoru. Still, if there was something he would never have imagined, it was that he would have to recall it to his mind when thinking about Kaoru's love for Kenshin. And, above all, that it would prove useless for the first time.
Old fool, he thought, forgetting in his distress the respect due to deceased people. Are some of those infinite particular forms called madness?
The gates of Yutaro's house were in front of his eyes, and for a second he stopped his thoughts to wonder how he had been able to arrive at the exact place without noticing. Shaking his head, he rang the bell, and crossed his arms to wait until a servant, dressed Western style, opened the door.
"I come for Tsubame," he said without any ceremonies, even before the man had the opportunity to open his mouth.
"Myoujin Yahiko-san has arrived, sir," the servant announced in front of the imposing wooden door. Yahiko shrugged his nose and walked past him inside the profusely decorated room where his friend was sitting on a ridiculous elevation having breakfast. Definitely, he thought once more, since he had inherited his father's fortune and got himself a Prussian fiancée, any sense of taste Yutaro might have possessed had gone down the gutter.
"You look horrible," the blond samurai exclaimed, shrugging his nose. "Where do you come from?"
Yahiko gave him a not very friendly glare that made Yutaro arch his eyebrow.
"You know perfectly where I come from," he grumbled.
"And?"
"Get back to the floor and we'll talk," he deadpanned. His friend shook his head in mild amusement.
"Why don't you just sit down on another chair?"
"Because I only came for Tsubame, anyway," the dark haired samurai retorted, already heading towards the door. As he was going to get out, though, Yutaro got up and quickly walked towards him.
"Hey, wait. You have problems."
"And who wouldn't?" At last having received the cue to unburden himself a bit, Yahiko could not resist the temptation of staying in the room with his only confidant outside the heavy atmosphere of the Kamiya dojo. With a tired expression, he let himself rest on the chair that was situated in front to Yutaro's, and his friend sat down on his again. "You saw the state Kenshin has been reduced to. Unable to stand it anymore after he asked for Kenji about ten times in a day, I made a journey to Kyoto to bring the brat back. And when we arrived yesterday, what do you think we found, except Kaoru with a fever, telling us that Kenshin infected her with syphilis before he left?"
Yutaro's green eyes were lowered in sadness.
"So you know… I didn't think you would already. It's terrible. I spent several days in disbelief, unable to accept it, and, even now, I still do not get why she would do it… but it looks as if it was indeed her choice."
"Her choice?" Yahiko got up with a jump, and started to pace around the room. "Her madness, you'll say. She's mad."
"According to Tsubame, she's deeply in love, to the point of wanting to die for her beloved." Yutaro said with a grimace. "But there's something in that equation I'm still unable to work out. I suppose you have to be a woman in order to understand it. Even Franziska found it "something terribly romantic"!
"Women and gaijin are crazy. If you're both…"
"Hey!"
"But it's true!" Yahiko shook his head, and started pacing again. "I can get a woman who dies to save his beloved, like Tomo… like someone I heard about once. But to die for no reason, that is something I can't get at all. Still worse, she, she…" Without being much aware of what he was doing, the dark-haired samurai seized the back of the empty chair with an iron grip. "She's leaving us for no reason! We'll have to see her grow feeble and lose her mind for no reason! She has forsaken her father's legacy for no reason, as well as her son!"
Yutaro sighed deeply, not surprised at all by his friend's sudden lose of control. The wounds were still recent in him, and he could also recall that first day of disbelief. And, besides…
"Come on, don't make more of a tragedy of it than what it is," he said in a conciliating tone. "Megumi-san said that she has still many years to live. If the disease gets to a latent phase, she can very well have thirty years more of life. You know that she has always been healthy..."
"That's all you care about it!" Yahiko snapped back. "Sit down and make calculations about how many years she has left! Fine, go on! After all, you never were half as close to her and her family than what I am!"
"Of course I was!" Yutaro got up as well, and walked towards the window. Once he was there, though, he stayed strangely motionless and silent for seconds before he decided to talk again. "She always was very important for me…"
Yahiko stayed quiet for a while. In a slow pace, he walked towards the window as well and stood there at his friend's side, watching how people walked the street under their gazes.
"Let's go and meet the women," he proposed at last, in a much more subdued voice. "And please… not another single word about this."
As both men started to climb the stairs, Yahiko's ears were suddenly assaulted by the terrifying sound of shouts and yells in a foreign language. Wincing, he stopped in his tracks and turned back to Yutaro.
"A fight?" he asked. For the first time since they had seen each other that day, his friend let go of a laugh.
"Franziska is singing. Don't you hear the piano?"
"Singing?" Yahiko's eyes widened in disbelief. "Gaijin are crazy!"
"Stop it with that remark already!"
"But it's true! Who in his right mind would stand a woman screaming all mornings in her room here?
"She's singing!" Yutaro shouted back. "And I won't tolerate that you disrespect her again!"
"I believe she can defend herself from this." his friend replied, before stepping back instinctively to dodge the punch that came after his words.
"Ignorant," the blonde samurai grumbled. Then, he gave him his back in a huff and stopped to call at the door from where all the horrible noises that disturbed Yahiko were coming from.
"Yes?" The piano stopped at once, and both were able to hear a grave female voice with a strong accent. Yutaro pushed the door open, and Yahiko followed him in.
"Yahiko has just arrived," the blond samurai announced, pointing at his friend. The room was very big, also decorated with all that imposing furniture, paintings and curtains that helped so much to make Yahiko dizzy. Tsubame was sitting at an enormous sofa that made her look insignificant in comparison, sipping a cup of tea, and, several steps away from her, Yutaro's fiancée got up from the piano to greet them with a delighted squeal.
"Welcome, welcome, Yahiko-san!" she exclaimed, embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks. Yahiko felt as if he could have died of shame in that same instant, but the feeling that Yutaro and Tsubame were watching prevented him from making a total fool of himself. That blonde, tall, and way too loud and straightforward woman with dresses full of ribbons was one of the normally fearless samurai's greatest terrors, and this had made him feel in a state of inferiority towards Yutaro for the first time in his life.
"Thanks, er… er… Faranziska-san?" he ventured. Even her name was able to beat all his powers.
"Franziska," she corrected him in a quick, didactic tone. "Franziska von Ossum-Bössinghoven. Not Ossum-Bossinghöven Franziska-von. It makes me so sick! So many people unable to pronounce even a simple surname!"
"Uh… erhm… okay," Yahiko nodded. Fortunately, Tsubame went to greet him at this moment, and he could focus all his attention on her.
"I'm so glad you're back," she said with a smile. Her cheerful expression looked somewhat false, though, and he guessed immediately why.
"I heard about it already," he reassured her, smiling for a moment in return. Sometimes, being strong was just too darn difficult. "Why don't we return home? I arrived yesterday and am still very tired."
"Okay." Tsubame took his arm discreetly, and bowed twice to both his host and his hostess. Well….at least it looked as if she had had a small weight taken off her shoulders. "Let's go home."
(to be continued)