WARNING: Spoilers! If you don't know who Kenji is, please read at your own risk! INSANITY! INSANITY!! INSANITY!!!
WITH DUE CREDIT: This fic was loosely spun off from two fics - "Over the Sting" by sasori and "Chronicles of a Rurouni", one of my earlier fics.
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Yesterday's Shadow is Tomorrow's Twilight
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Chapter 27: Interlude - Day One
Enishi was jolted awake by a loud cry for help.
Cursing under his breath, he shot up, grabbed his sword and dashed out of the room, leaving the rousing Kenji on the futon beside him with a sleepy-eyed look of bewilderment on his face.
He pounded down the corridors, not caring who or what he was disturbing from their slumber. Following the source of the sound, he eventually skid to a stop in front of a slightly opened door looking into a room full of books. The same one he saw Aoshi in yesterday, his mind helpfully supplied. Shaking that absurdly pointless thought away, he stepped closer.
Aoshi and Misao were already there, and so was Soujirou. They were looking with apprehension at a dark, dingy corner of the room, situated right behind a mound of messy books. In particular, Misao and Soujirou were staring hard at the corner. Aoshi was just blinking nonchalantly.
And Soujirou was cowering.
Behind Aoshi.
The situation flashed 'NOT GOOD' in neon, rainbow technicolour.
"What's going on?" Enishi managed to wheeze. He hadn't realised how hard he had been running until he heard his breathless voice. Misao was the only one who turned to regard him.
"I don't know," she said frankly. "Aoshi-sama said something about cleaning up the mess in this room, so I went to bring them some tea. The next thing I knew there was somebody crying for help from the room, so I turned back and they were already like that."
Enishi barely had enough time to think before he saw a blue blur dive and cower behind him instead. "Yukishiro-san!" Soujirou sounded pained and his voice was trembling. "Help! Heelp!!" And whiney, too. "That fellow... /that fellow/ is /here/!"
Instantly the white-haired man's eyes narrowed in understanding. "Oh, /that fellow/ is here, eh?" He stared sharply at the dark corner, withdrawing his sword as he spoke - much to the horror of everybody else who was not cowering in the room at the moment. "I'll teach that fellow a lesson this time!"
With a leap and a metallic swinging sound - Enishi lunged at the corner. There proceeded to be noise and flying books. And to cut a long story short, Enishi punctured a hole in the ex-corner, which was now a ventilation dent instead. Yes, it was a very large hole.
Misao held her head with her hands and screamed, "What do you think you're doing?! My library!" She obviously had put much effort into making this room cozy for Aoshi. Who, by the way, was eyeing the only exit of the room with strange fascination.
"Never underestimate your enemy, ninja," Enishi began in his pseudo wiseman tone. He made another swipe, and to cut another long story short, the paper-and-wood wall crumpled to the ground, revealing the empty room beside it. "Especially /that fellow/! The single most disgusting thing in existence - even more so than my brother-in-law! So small, but so powerful!!"
As if on cue, /that fellow/ scurried out from one of the upturned books and paused dramatically in the middle of the room, staring at the opponents with smug apathy.
Misao's eyebrow twitched.
"A cockroach. A /COCKROACH/!!" Her screech went unheard, for Enishi continued to attack the household pest, which took cover under every and any thing it could squeeze into.
"Dammit, this thing is too fast!" The white-haired man was saying as he brushed by Misao with a sword strike that would have taken her hair and half her shoulder off if his aim had been bad. Her eyebrow twitched some more. "Tenken! Stop cowering like a damsel in distress and do your Shukuchi thing!"
In reply, Soujirou just shook his head fiercely, from where he cowered behind Misao. Aoshi had apparently fled the scene somewhere in between Enishi tearing up the books to Enishi ripping down the walls, and was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, Misao saw the birth of a new life principle.
If you can't beat them, you join them.
With a loud warcry she gathered all the kunais she had hidden in her various articles of clothings and flung them at the filthy intruder. As all the darts flew frighteningly close to a) the scurrying cockroach and b) Enishi, it was unclear who, in her eyes, was the true filthy intruder. Nevertheless, after losing both his cowering pillars, Soujirou now cowered behind the doorpost, looking into the room in dread, wondering if he fled for it now, would the cockroach scurry out and follow him? Damnable little pests. The ninja extraordinaire of Kyoto and the man formerly feared in all of Shanghai could not hope to even glimpse at its feelers. What sheer power!
And, it was into this scene that Kenji walked.
"What the-" he gasped and almost did not manage to duck from one of Misao's wildly flying kunais. Putting a hand over his heart, he demanded, "What was that for?!"
Two pairs of eyes turned on him with murderous intent.
"BELOW YOU!" Yelled the voices which belonged to the eyes in amazing unity. Kenji took just a split second to pause, then scrambled to look at what monstrosity was lurking below him.
His eyes flashed when he recognised the sturdy shape of the resident household pest. With great bravoda he lifted one sandled foot up.
And crushed the little creature beneath it.
There was silence.
"Is it-" Soujirou gulped, from his position behind the doorpost, "-gone?"
Kenji narrowed his eyes in concentration, wriggling his toes. It was as if he believed wriggling his toes would tell him whether the creature beneath his foot was dead or not. "I'm going to lift my foot up now..."
"NO!!" The darker-haired wanderer immediately cried, his knuckles white against the doorpost. "No! No you don't! You don't do anything until we're sure that thing is dead! Like, upside down with all its legs pointing to the skies! Twitching and spasming and immobile! Never able to stand up again to terrorise anymore poor, innocent soul-"
"Kenji," a deep, rumbling voice cut Soujirou short, and Aoshi moved into view from wherever he had come from, with a large wooden basin in his hands. "Take your foot up when I count to three."
"Shinomori-saan~~" Soujirou wailed in protest.
"Don't be such a wuss, Tenken," Enishi sighed. But there was no real malevolence in his tone.
"But I-"
"One..."
"Stop that already. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is for the second most powerful man in the Juppongatana to be afraid of a stupid cockroach?"
"Two..."
"But they-"
"Three."
Kenji obediently lifted his foot up, expecting to see a flattened household pest, considering the sheer amount of strength he had applied to his foot when stamping down on the cockroach.
There was no such thing.
The cockroach jerked onto its feet, and scurried towards the closest source of heat it could find.
Soujirou.
"Meep!" The boyish wanderer immediately leapt behind Aoshi in a feat of agility. "Stay away!" He wailed.
Enishi, on the other hand, had gotten into a pose and was about to rip the cockroach's head out, possibly along with at least ten floorboards of the corridor. Behind him, Misao was taking accurate aims to pin the pest to the pathways by its six legs - meaning she was also about to do considerable damage to the flooring. Soujirou looked like he was going to jump onto the ceiling with the help of Aoshi's head - that would also mean destruction of several planks of wood and most probably Aoshi's hairdo. Kenji gaped in general annoyance, while Aoshi slowly removed the lid to the basin he held in his hands.
Before anyone else had the chance to move, Aoshi tipped the container and out gushed its contents. It washed across the wood smoothly, drowning everybody's toes and the cockroach which had stopped moving the moment it touched the clear liquid. It froze, as more ripples of the liquid washed across its body, until finally, it slumped against the floor with what Kenji thought was foam at its mouth.
It was not until the liquid stopped sloshing down the corridor that Soujirou found his voice.
"What," there was awe in the wanderer's tone, "new, secret, lethal, unadulterated rat poison was that, Shinomori-san?!"
Aoshi remained silent, although everybody turned their expectant eyes upon him. What one able ninja, one mafia boss and one genius swordsman could not achieve, this palpable gush of translucent fluid had. The object of their intense enmity now laid prostrate, curled up as a article of oblivion. What was the secret to the easy conquering of this unhealthy, indestructible beast?! They just had to know!
The tallest man among them all made a noise akin to a sigh. He passed the now empty basin to Kenji and said.
"That was last night's leftover miso."
Before stalking back to wherever he had emerged from.
It took ten seconds for everybody to register what Aoshi had said.
"Whoever said the redhead was anything like his father needs to get his tongue checked," Enishi mused aloud.
And the temple heard nothing but loud guffaws for the rest of the day.
... to be continued
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24/3/04
xd@tougenkyou.net