"Himura Kenshin. Hah!" Yukawa Shinichiro pushed his hands through his hair, shaking it back from his temples, and took a deep breath. His eyes were wandering restlessly across the table. They lit on the sake jar; he poured himself a cup and downed it in one gulp. "You have no idea what you're sheltering up there."
The Tobe siblings were sitting across from him, both leaning forward with their forearms resting on the table, almost comically identical. Akane looked angry, Hideki looked bewildered, and his wife-- Eri, sitting beside him, looked afraid. Shinichiro ran his hands through his hair again.
"What are you-" Akane began, but he cut her off.
"You won't understand -- you CAN'T understand without having seen it. There's a story I have to tell you. About the revolution." He poured another cup of sake, sipped it, then put it down and leaned forward. "It was the last year of the Bakumatsu. Summer. The last summer before the start of open war. The Kyoto municipal government was finally getting desperate enough to listen to reason and call in the samurai in force. The best of three districts." He paused. "Heh. The Shinsengumi may have been good, but they weren't born to it."
He looked around the table. The Tobes were watching him with wide eyes, their lips slightly parted, both of them. Eri had lowered her eyes to the table, her face a mask. He knew she didn't like it when he talked about the revolution. She had supported fully his decision to go to war -- she understood the duty and the honor, she was a true daughter of samurai -- but since that time it seemed something had changed in her, not to mention in the rest of the world. He patted her hand gently.
"We'd been working with the Shinsengumi, setting up a big raid against the Ishin Shishi rebels. The Shinsengumi's spies had located a bunch of their hideouts, and we raided them all that night, all at once. It worked.
"We figured we had most of the leaders -- Okubo, Katsura.... Of course they fled, but we expected that and made sure they fled towards the river. We'd done the raids in an arc, so we would always be behind them. And the Shinsengumi were holding the bridges." He smiled coldly, showing his teeth.
"They must have started figuring it out at some point, as the groups met up, started realizing they were being herded. We had the main body of them headed down one of the main avenues towards the river, with two other groups being driven in from either side." He indicated with his hands, a wedge-shaped motion.
"Four blocks from the river there's a major intersection, where a bunch of streets and alleys come together with the main road. We'd had troops coming down the whole maze of them, timed to meet up all at once and keep the Ishin Shishi moving in the right direction. I was up on the rooftop -- we had a bunch of scouts and runners, to keep the timing right -- so I could see what was happening better than our men on the ground.
"Just as they were clearing the intersection, it happened. One of the Ishin Shishi swordsmen suddenly turned back, running flat out from their rear line back towards our main unit. I thought he was a bystander at first, caught up in the raid. He didn't look like a swordsman. Our troop didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. He just cut right into them, scattered them, turned them every which way. One person... it was impossible. The way he moved... They couldn't even touch him." He paused and took a deep breath, glancing around, his hazel eyes haunted, and dropped his voice.
"No human being can move like that. It was just not possible. I had a good view from the rooftop and the street was lit up with lanterns, but I kept losing track of him, in spite of the red hair. He cut right through the troop -- I know those samurai, some of the best there are -- and they couldn't even touch him. He could have slaughtered them all, but he just drove them back long enough for the Ishin Shishi to scatter up all the side streets. Then he disappeared."
"I learned later from the Shinsengumi who he was. A hitokiri for the Choshuu faction, called Battousai. Himura Battousai. I tried to find out who he was, where he'd come from, but he wasn't from any clan I'd ever heard of. A lot of the Ishin Shishi were samurai, but not him, apparently. A peasant."
Shinichiro took a deep breath, blew it out, and continued. "Our trap was a complete failure. Almost all of them got away. We managed to kill a few of them, but we lost a lot of good men.
"The Shinsengumi blamed us, of course. The morons. That started infighting, wrecked our unity. We never had as good a chance as that night to stop it all, and Battousai wrecked it for us. I never saw him again. Until now." He looked around the table, running his hands through his hair again.
"It can't be," Akane whispered. "He's just a-"
"I didn't recognize him at first," Shinichiro continued. "His... eyes... are different somehow. But the red hair and that cross-shaped scar -- it's Battousai, for sure."
There was a long pause.
"All right then," Akane said slowly, her eyebrows quirked. "All right then." She nodded, once, regaining her momentum. "So Kenshin was a swordsman in the revolution." So were you, she didn't say. "Are you trying to tell us he's dangerous?" She sounded defensive, challenging him.
"You still don't understand." Shinichiro looked around at them, dismayed. "Don't you see? He's not just a swordsman. It should have ended that night. We should have stamped out the Ishin Shishi once and for all. The revolution should never have happened! Our strategy was perfect -- we COULD NOT have failed. But we did. Because of him!" He looked back and forth between the Tobes, frustrated. They still didn't get it. "This world-- this whole Meiji era--"
Eri laid her hand over his, distracting him and sapping his momentum.
"Wait a minute," Hideki said slowly. He was frowning, working something out. "Something doesn't fit here. If Kenshin's some big Ishin Shishi hero from the revolution... Didn't all the Ishin Shishi leaders throw away their swords and take up posts in the new government?" He ticked off points on his fingers. "So why was he out wandering in the middle of winter, carrying a sword, sleeping in the open and looking like he hasn't eaten in days?" He glanced at Eri. "That's why I assumed he was a samurai's kid. Um. No offense."
"Battousai never joined the government," Shinichiro said. "He disappeared. After the battle of Toba Fushimi, the first decisive battle of the war."
"Then what's he been doing, all this time?" Hideki looked at Shinichiro, suspicion growing in his eyes.
"The sword." Shinichiro slapped the table decisively. "Let me see his sword. I'll be able to tell if it's been... used, recently."
Akane shuddered, then nodded reluctantly. "All right. I'll get it."
