Act Seven: "I Give Only Half…"

My eyes flickered open, and I raised a hand to my pounding head. I sat up and looked around, taking in the strange and ornate room. I was lying on a woven mat, and dressed in a beautiful pink kimono. But this wasn't where I was supposed to be. The last thing I remembered was a sweet smell from the incense I lit, and then something knocking sharply against my head, and watching the ground rise to meet me. Where was I?

Sitting up, I brushed my long braid over my shoulder and looked closely around the room, trying to figure out where I was. A few of the things in it faintly stirred remembrance in the back of my mind, but I couldn't remember anything concrete.

A voice filtered through the shoji walls, painted with scenes on misty mountains and cranes in pools of water. It moved down the hall, growing away from me until it became faint. I stood up and rushed to the door, banging on the edges with my fists. "Where am I? What do you want?!" I yelled out to the person, but they other didn't hear or didn't care.

Restlessly, I moved around the room, picking things up to examine them. My old clothes were carefully folded next to the mat I had lay on, and a cherry-wood desk sat near a window. I went to the desk and opened drawers, rifling through them to try to find any scrap of information. All I got was blank paper and writing brushes, along with an empty inkpot.

Going back over to my pile of clothes, I exchanged the elaborate kimono for them, because I felt more comfortable in clothing I could move in rather then dressed up like a doll. As I bent down and picked up my haori and hakama, something caught my eye on the small shelf above the mat.

A small jade emblem in the shape of a viper, curled around it's self with it's arrow-shaped head resting on it's coils. My clothing spilled from my hands as they turned numb, falling in a pile to the floor as I stared at the figure with an open jaw. Viper, the mysterious ninja who came from his master to me. The elegant house and rich kimono. A group of slave-traders who wanted me back in the slave trade. A dojo dubiously called the 'Snake Pit'. The gang of traders who had captured and enslaved me after I ran from the okiya. The Black Adder Group. The most feared of the top lords in the slave trade. Hishori had been one of them, along with four other men. When they had taken of me, they didn't have names, but gradually over time, I had figured them out.

There had been Hishori, one of the cruelest, but now dead. Then there was a silent man who almost never spoke, named Ryroko Jinji. A small man who was cheerful, and didn't seem the part of the trader he was, but on closer inspection, he proved to be just as cruel as Hishori, only hiding his rage behind a small smile and a laugh. Boku Nokumi.

Next was a personal friend of Hishori. His brother. Mygomi Rei. With the handsome looks of his younger brother, the elder also was just as outspoken and self-confident.

The last was a man whose face I never saw. He was always sitting in the shadows, a tall and muscular man. His voice had placed him in his early thirties, and it seemed from the conversations I remembered that he was the unofficial leader of the Black Adder Group. He had only one name that I knew: Tsunaji.

Frowning, I settled back on my haunches and frowned at the jade serpent that seemed to leer at me, it's forked tongue stuck out it's mouth, hissing at me as it bared it's sharp fangs. I swept a hand behind it, and pushed it over the edge of the shelf and onto the floor, where it shattered. "I've spent too many dark years on my life on you," I whispered down to the shards. "It's time for me to be done with you, and your poison."

I quickly reacted down again for my own clothing and changed. Walking back over to the shoji screen door, I jiggled the locked handle and then I ran my finger along the edge near where the handle stuck out. Finding where rice paper met wood, I carefully pushed against the edge with my fingertips, pressing and sliding with my fingernails until I felt the screen lift away.

Peeling it away from the wood, I ripped the section away near the handle and stuck my hand out to the other side of the doorknob, unlocking it from the outside. Pushing the door open, I let myself out cautiously, looking down the hall in both directions. It was clear, and I started silently down the end of the hall to a lit room. Pressing up against the wall, I looked around the corner. Empty yet again. The room was a formal sitting room, and lit with a few lanterns burning their wicks slowly. I dragged a cushion to the door and sat down, keeping my eyes out on the hall.

I turned sideways for a minute to look at the lanterns and see how long the wicks had been lit, and my eyes caught the sound of a soft footfall down the hall. My head jolted up again, and I looked out.

A long shadow at the end of the hall raised a hand and gestured me closer with it, the skin of their hand flashing white in the near darkness. Turning, they leapt over the railing over the garden, planting a hand on it and pushing themselves over it. I would know a move like that anywhere, preformed with that grace and ease of having done it numerous times. "Nagara!" I whispered under my breath and leapt up from the cushion I sat on.

I ran to the railing and leaned down over it, my braid falling back over my shoulder, peering into the garden below. The assassin was nowhere to be seen, but that didn't necessarily mean that he wasn't there. An assassin's job was to hide where others couldn't see him, and lie there silently in wait for his prey.

Frowning, I turned my back on the railing, hurrying down to the lower level and out into the garden. I stopped on the porch, and listened sharply for anything that could give the crazed killer away. An intake of breath, or the scuff of a shoe against loose dirt. But nothing met my ears. Nagara was playing cat-and-mouse. He wouldn't come out until I went looking for him. But two could play this game.

"Tell me, Nagara, are you playing this last game of 'find me, kill me' for your masters, of is this just your own revenge?"

His voice floated out of the darkness, but I couldn't pin-point where it came from. "No, I'm doing this for myself. I owe you your death, at least, after you abandoned me out on the last mission."

"The Group will be mad at you if you get to me before they do."

"They only want Sachi-yabi back for her power and beauty. But I only want her back so that I can kill her and know that I killed the best there was."

"You don't ask for much, do you, Nagara?"

"Only for you to bleed out at my feet as I watch you die slowly."

"Thank you. I feel so much better now that I know you'll savor my death."

The assassin suddenly appeared next to the tall willow tree before me, his black clothing blending in with the dark bark and wood. "We could have been a magnificent pair, Sachi-yabi, you and I. We were as good as they come, but then you had to go and leave me to finish the last mission by myself because you got cold feet when we were sent to kill Kei."

"What did you expect me to do," I spat at him, "Kill the man that protected me while I worked at the Green Dragon?"

"He only protected you while you were there. You made the choice to leave and exchange prostitution for the life of an assassin when rented out by the Group in exchange for a small bit of the cost of your freedom."

"I had my freedom! They played unfair! I paid Tengai my sum before I left with the Battôsai."

"And then Tengai, bless him, went and spent it, squandering your money that was meant to go to your Masters. So they still had claim on you until you paid them back."

"I wouldn't trade my freedom for Kei's death." I'd hurt Kei once. I refused to hurt the man again, after all he had done for me. So I ran, like a fox, away and into the night to hide in her arms, going to the only place I knew how to trust. To wherever Battôsai was.

"Even though that damn samurai was sniffing too close into the Group's doings, you still couldn't finish the last assignment. So you left me to defend myself against the samurai and his friends while you ran like the fox you are."

"I ran to get away from the Group, and from you. I didn't want your insanity poisoning me the longer I stayed."

The other assassin scowled. "You left me to die without even saying 'sayônara'. I had such high hopes for us, Sachi-yabi, if only you had stayed. We would have over-thrown our masters and started our own order of assassins to rule as we wished. No one would have stood in our way. You and I could have ruled the under-world in both Kyoto and Tokyo."

I snorted. "I never had any intentions of ruling any world, thank you."

Nagara sighed. "I know. That's why after I found out that you ran back to your loyalist dog I vowed to kill you, myself. And I guess there is no better night to do so then this."

Looking back inside the dojo, I turned and frowned back at Nagara. "Where's the Group?"

He smiled ruefully. "I had to send them out on a little excursion to get them out of the house so I could use it to keep you tonight. They're chasing after a…dog, let's say…who they think has you with him. But once they get back, they'll find you…out here on the ground, under their nose the whole time."

"And you will be…?"

"Gone into the night."

"As always."

"Yes. There was a time when you would follow me into the darkness silently."

"That time is long gone, Nagara. What was will never be again."

"Too bad." We were both silent for a moment. I looked up into his black whirlpools of eyes and stared down at him.

"Well? What are you waiting for? Kill me. Let's get this over with."

"Agreed. But we'll do it the old way, no swords, just jujitsu. And if you're not on your knees and begging for your life within a half-hour, we'll bring out the katana."

"Fine."

He grinned sharply at me, and then disappeared from the side of the tree, into the darkness and I heard his laugh reverberate around the night air. "Come on, Sachi-yabi, the night waits for you to join her again."

I stepped off the porch step and onto the grass, thankful I had changed into my darker clothes. They helped me blend in more then the pink kimono would have. I cautiously walked to the back side of the willow silently, and ducked behind it. A moment later, I felt the trunk wiggle a bit as someone came to the other side. With my back pressed flat against the tree, I swung my right arm out around the tree, hand flattened out so that the strong side of it along my palm and little finger smashed into Nagara's left shoulder. "Left shoulder for left shoulder," I hissed at him. "Mine still hurts. It's time for you to earn a little pain."

We both pushed off the tree and circled around it, watching each other carefully. The trunk came between us, and when I shifted, Nagara was gone. I whiled around, but too slowly.

He had struck me in the back hard, using the sides of his hands like I had used mine. I cringed in, and then straightened, grabbing onto his wrist as his hand shot out again. I pulled him toward me as he went off-balance, and kicked him in the stomach. Nagara wheezed. "There's some of the girl I used to know. Bring her all out. I want to see her all again."

"No chance," I retorted tersely.

"Then without all of yourself, I'll just be able to kill you," Nagara said matter-of-factly, and pulled back with his arm, and me still holding onto his arm fell forward. He lifted up a knee into my stomach, and I gasped out. Using the same knee, he kicked me away, and I rolled across the lawn, stopping curled up in a fetal position as I squeezed my eyes shut in pain. He walked over to me and rested a foot on my side.

"Ready to beg yet?" he asked. I opened my eyes and shook my head.

"Not a chance." I grabbed the foot on top of me and flipped him over, jumping up as he fell back. He jumped up and kicked toward my face. I bent over backward and grabbed his ankle as he kicked over my face, using the power of the kick to drop and throw him over my shoulder.

We stood face-to-face again, and he jumped up high, into the air. I dropped to the ground and planted my hands, using my hands and my left foot to pivot around as I swung my right leg out in a low kick, hoping to knock him out of the air.

As he dropped back to the ground, I jumped high, kicking straight out with my right leg as I curled my left one back in. He was below my kick at this point, and I went over his head. Landing behind him, he lunged forward with a fist out and I jumped up to a kick-spin, but he checked his speed and dropped again instead. I landed and rolled backwards as he stood.

A few yards from each other, we breathed shortly, and I ran back toward him. He kicked up, and I crossed my forearms across my chest to block him. His foot hit my crossed arms and bounced off.

Backing up, Nagara held his own arms in an 'X' as he got ready to strike with his hands. Reaching forward, I hooked my thumb around his right wrist and placed the span of my hand between his wrists, locking my elbow and pushing back on him. He leaned forward and bashed his forehead into mine, making me let go as I fell back.

I landed on the ground with my arms supporting me behind my back, and Nagara stood above me, rubbing his wrists. "You don't give up so easily. I think it's about time to break out the katana," he said, and I nodded.

"Enough of this. The only way to kill someone the way you want to is with a sword." At the same time I said it, I cringed back inside my heart. Nagara was the better swordsman, as had been proved at the dojo match. If there was ever a time that I would need all my power, it was now. But that was taboo. I hadn't used it in years. Would I be able to control it again now?

I caught a flash through the air and jumped to the side as a katana imbedded it's self into a tree behind me. "Nice move," I told Nagara, wrenching it free and holding it in front of myself in Hassô. He attacked as fast as I thought he would, striking down. I blocked it and felt my knees shake, about to give.

Lowering myself lower and lower until I was on my knees, I pressed up on his sword until it gradually began to raise back up, giving my space to stand up under it. My eyes flashed their green fire, and I gritted my teeth, baring them at Nagara.

"Welcome back," he whispered. "Welcome to life again, Sachi-yabi."

His sword fell again, and we both slashed in on each other at the same time, swords meeting and shooting off sparks as metal brushed metal. Nagara curved in to me, and I jumped over his sword, a close call as it trimmed off the few extra inches on the bottom of my hakama pants that hung lower.

I landed, and he continued his spin that his great curve had started, gaining speed as he came in a second time. I raised my sword just in time, and his blade nicked just over the edge of mine, biting into the exposed skin on my collarbone.

Gritting my teeth, I flicked my wrist, turning my sword sideways so he couldn't push harder and cut deeper into me. But at the same time I protected myself, I also had to graze my skin with my own sword blade, gently slicing open a patch of skin along my shoulder. I winced in pain, and bit my lip, but was able to save myself by using the butt of the hilt to slam it into Nagara's forehead.

He fell back, and then recovered. For someone as insane as he was, pain was an added pleasure of fighting. He almost got high off of the sweet pain that coursed through his veins, singing. Smiling psychotically, he cut down again, coming closer then ever to cutting my middle as I hurried to block. The great swordsman grinned. "Good save."

I heard the garden gates burst open, but paid no attention as a familiar voice rang out.

"NO!"

I yelled, levering my sword up so that his blade slipped off mine. Swinging it back around to myself, I thrust it out sideways and parallel to the ground. A sideways sword was always the hardest to block. Nagara dodged it, laughing insanely. "Ah! The Night-Dragon strike! You can't block it because it comes in from the side so fast, and flat. Too bad I was there when it was taught to know that the only way to avoid it is to dodge it, or else you surely would have had me!"

Breathing hard, I looked up at him, having lost control of my eyes that burned with a fire lit from my soul. I realized that they only way to get out of here alive would be to kill Nagara. This was a fight to the death. And having lost control of my boundless power, I wasn't the one in control of myself anymore. My rage was.

From across the courtyard, I heard Kenshin yell again and flicked my eyes to him. Both Sano and Kaoru had grabbed onto him, and were holding him back from running into the battle I was in. They barely were keeping control of him as he strained forward, reaching out.

"NO! LET ME GO! LET ME GO! SACHI! NO!"

Turning my eyes away from him, I slid my right hand up to the top of the katana's handle, and dropped my right arm along the hilt, with my left guiding it at the bottom. Using my arm to swing it down, I guided it down with all my strength. As it fell, Nagara was grinning from under my sword. "Yes," he whispered. "Now she is free again. My work here is finished. Today marks the start of your fall into hell again. I'll see you there."

My katana blade bit down, across his left shoulder and cutting down to his heart. He fell beneath me, still smiling as blood poured in red rivers from him. "So sweet and warm…" he mused, and his whirlpool eyes fluttered, and then went blank.

"Agghh!" I shouted, pulling my blade from him and throwing it down onto the ground beside him. "Be at peace, Nagara," I whispered. "I hope you fair well in hell."

I turned away from my fallen ex-partner's body where it lay still and red on the dark grass, staining the patch around it black and wet in the moonlight. As I started to walk back across the garden to where Kenshin and the others were, I tripped, all the power from me leaving in a great whoosh of energy, leaving behind a frail hollow shell of me. I dropped, exhausted. Kenshin broke free of the other two, and ran, dropping to my side. "Sachi?" he asked softly. "Are you alright?"

Kenshin's eyes widened. "That's the real fire of Shinrin Sachi."

I stood my ground, hands loose by my sides, chest still rising and falling rapidly with my rasping breath. I looked him full in the eyes and inclined my head to him ever so little. "Yes. Welcome to Sachi-yabi. Sachi-Night Beauty, who moves like silk lightening."

"All these times that these men said that…that was what they meant? They knew about your skill?"

I put my head down. "I meant it to be a secret, but it got out into a circle of close slave-traders, all friends, yet rivals. And whoever got me not only got a whore, they got an assassin in the side, for hire if I could buy a bit of my freedom in exchange for murder."

"Why didn't you use it in the dojo fight? Why didn't you protect yourself?"

"You were all around me. I didn't want to let the secret out."

"But why don't you use it, if only to help you, if you have it?"

Looking down and away for a moment, I looked back up at him, steady-eyed, but there was a new clearness behind the deep pools of green that sucked everything around me in and returned nothing. "I made a vow to myself never to use more then half. You know what it's like to make a vow. You don't break it, if at all possible. Because once I pass that half-way point…who knows where I come out of it? It terrifies me," I whispered.

Kenshin dropped his sword loosely to his side, and shook his head. "All this time you fought with me, and I had no idea. You deceived me. Why?"

"Because I didn't want to become what you are."

"Why not? Why not be great?" Sano interjected, and I switched my gaze to him. He was hit with my fire-eyes, and turned away sharply. "Sorry."

"Why not kill if you could? I have no desire to be great. I have only desire to live."

"How did I not know?" Kenshin asked, sounding at a loss with himself.

"You aren't the only one with secrets, Battôsai. And I've kept mine longer and deeper in me then yours. After living the life I did, you won't know anything unless I want you to. That goes for all of you," I added as an afterthought, looking at the other two where they stood to the side.

Turning, I walked away, holding my bloody katana at my side. Stopping a few strides out, I lifted my blade and ran two fingers down the length of the flat of it, and flicked the blood that still ran down it away to the floor.

Without turning my back, I whispered back to them. "I'll see you all back at the dojo. Jâ, mata."

Kaoru turned to Kenshin as soon as Sachi had disappeared from view into the night's darkness out the dojo's doors. "I think you made her mad."

Kenshin's eyes till followed the path she had taken into the night. "No. She hurts inside. She would have been mad at anyone who discovered her for what she really is."

"How did she do it?" Sano asked, still at ends with why Sachi refused to acknowledge her skills.

"Some just are born with it, and have it. She's still rudimentary, but this one has no doubt at some point someone taught her. I wonder who it was…" Kenshin mused quietly, and then trailed off thoughtfully. He snapped out of it, turning to Kaoru.

"Kaoru-dono, did you have any idea? Did she talk to you, or maybe Megumi-san?"

Kaoru shook her head. "No. Not to me. She said that she had a secret in her past, and that maybe one day she would tell me, but…she had always said that she was going to tell you someday. Maybe you just found out before she could tell you."

Reeling back suddenly, Kenshin's eyes widened as his memory flashed back to a few days past.

' "Kenshin, can I talk to you about something?"

"What is it, bijin?"

A pause. "There's something that I want to tell you."

His mouth pulled down in a frown. "What is it you wish to tell this one?"

"I-"

The moment was lost in the void of words unsaid between the two of them that grew volumes each day.'

"Oh," he exclaimed suddenly, and then turned, running out the door after the girl in her wake.

"I woke up one morning in one of the master's houses, pressed up against a wall as if I was trying to disappear inside of it and hide. I realized as I sat up and looked over the room that I barely knew, that was mine, that had nothing in it I was attached to, that my way of living had gotten stuck on 'survive', and that there was no one, no thing, no place that I actually truly enjoyed. I felt like I was drowning without any hope of ever breathing clean air again."

"You fell into the trap of the assassin life," Kenshin said quietly, looking down. "There is danger for yourself in becoming attached to anything, having any comfort, so you live your life of no emotions so you won't feel the pain."

"Yes. I couldn't trust anyone, so I withdrew."

"You lost yourself."

"I am guilty of that. Somewhere along the way, I lost the girl to the killer."

"But this one doesn't understand," Kenshin said, his eyes large and serious in the lamplight. "Why put yourself through all that for me?"

"Because I wanted to see you again. I know that no matter what I did, how many people I had to kill to get there, my freedom to find you was all that mattered to me. We had had a promise that we would meet again to be together in Tokyo without the past. And I don't break my promises."

"This one doesn't either."

"Then through Fate both our pasts became part of a story of bloodshed for different causes. Yours was for justice, mine was for hope."

"Though I would have had the bloodshed not be spilt for me, if there had been another way."

I smiled crookedly, and reached forward, tapping him on the end of the nose. "Then you should have come looking for me, dolt, so I didn't go out looking for you and get myself in trouble."

"That I should have." His response caught me off guard, and my smile fumbled for a moment. "We'd been apart for too long, bijin. I didn't realize that until I saw you again. It's good to have you by my side again."

"As I am happy to be there."

I stopped for a moment, and my smile faded. "Kenshin, how long will it be before I'm no longer an 'assassin'? How long will it be until I forget that time and am forgive for my deeds? Take the title away from me. I don't want it anymore."

He looked up at me sharply, his eyes taking on an expression I had never seen before, one of agony and bitterness. "Never. You will never lose the blood that was split by you and stained your hands, or the cries of the people that you killed from orders, for money. Their cries of terror and pleas of mercy will follow you into your grave, and until then, haunt your dreams and your thoughts, ringing in your mind. That is your punishment. Knowing that you killed all of them, every last face floating before your waking eyes."

"I've heard their anguish. I've heard their hearts cry out in pain. Their loved ones screams. I'm tired and weary. And if what you say is true, I won't get the release from them that I need. I will be an assassin forever, then."

"It is the weight you must bear with sorrow and repent for what you have done, so that you may never forget."

"Those poor people...and their tear-stained faces and cries of terror reflected in their eyes…I was a monster to them."

"We all must battle our own demons."

"But what if I am my own demon?"

Kenshin looked up at me, reaching forward and closing my eyes with two fingers. "Find peace with yourself, Sachi. Forgive yourself first."