Author's notes: Well I'll admit this took me a lot longer than I intended. This chapter has been an absolute monster to write, at first I couldn't get the mood right then I had all sorts of other nagging problems with it too. Kenshin's far more trouble when he's awake. I'm still not sure I'm completely satisfied with it.

This whole fic has been a bit of an experiment on my part from day one. I've tried really hard to connect the mood of each chapter with Kenshin's state of mind, and I'm not really sure that I succeeded. It does sound a bit bitty in places. Still, I think it's turned out fairly well for all that. I think there's possibly one more chapter and an epilogue left to go. The next chapter is already in the works so hopefully it won't take anything like as long as this one. I'd really love to hear what you think of all this so please take the time to read and review.

He'd never known that loneliness was silent. Nor that the sound of his own breathing could be so loud. A soft gust of cold air dragged a lock of Kenshin's hair against the back his hand. His calloused palm tightened around the smooth, comforting surface of his wakizashi's saya, as the weapon reclined in its usual resting place against his collarbone. Kenshin crouched in a corner, his head lolling against one of the huge wooden posts that held up the roof. The floorboards were cold and hard. He hadn't slept very well and when he did, his dreams were a strange lucid mix of the distant past and the present. Exhausted and anxious as he was, they left him feeling deeply uneasy, but it was the uncanny silence that bothered him the most.

He tilted his head down and gazed at the still form on the futon. The darkness hid the distortion of her face but Kenshin could still make out the familiar contours of her body. The cold air whispered about him chilling him to the edge of immobility. He propped his cheek against his arm and pulled himself into a weary knot. His cheeks were prickly with several days' growth, the reddish stubble scratched against his cold skin. The house was very quiet. In the stillness, every sound seemed amplified a thousand times. Branches tapped and scraped against the walls making his skin prickle with ill ease and his fingers tighten around the saya. Had it ever been this quiet before? The silence seemed only to grow deeper just as the snow had.

Thin drafts of icy air slipped in from unexpected places and trickled over his bare skin. They sent the cold grey ashes from the spent fire into little swirling dances. It was dark but his eyes were accustomed to the black and silver monochrome of the night time world. He'd watched the fire burn down until it was nothing more than a pile of ash and slowly darkening embers. He had forgotten what it felt like to be the prey not the predator. The memory of how it felt to be vulnerable and insecure had become nothing more than a faint wisp of smoke on a distant horizon. Until now.

Some deep, primitive, inner instinct had driven him to endure the cold and let the fire die. A fire would only announce his presence to anyone who might be near by. Somehow he knew that the ambush and Tomoe's death was only the beginning of something else. Something far more threatening. His ears strained through the silence for each small noise. His feet dug against the bare floorboards at the faintest sound. He couldn't help it. His nerves were taut as bowstrings and now that his head was clear he found that several things didn't quite add up. There was certainly still someone out there who had been in on the whole thing. Although he knew logically that Iizuka would already be some distance away, there was the undeniable fact that he had a limited ability to protect himself at this point. Not that he was sure he wanted too. Kenshin could hear Hiko lecturing him in his own head and he was sure that anything that passed his lips would only taste of blood and regret.

Tomoe lay at his feet, a darker patch in the darkness, forever silent and still. The only movement came from the thin drafts of air as they fingered her hair and the edge of the blankets. He found it hard to look at her without feeling a rush of disgust and maudlin self-pity surging up his throat. The disgust was bad enough but he had a natural aversion to self-pity and his own only increased his disgust with himself. He shifted his weight and lent his head against the post, as his fingers tightened around the wakizashi drawing it close. The smooth familiarity of the cool, hard saya brought him some semblance of security. He didn't like what he'd become, but his instinct for self-preservation was too ingrained. He couldn't help it, he didn't want to live but he didn't want to die either. The hot blood in his veins continued to circulate with each strong steady heart beat.

His eyelids sagged, and his head flopped against the wall. The moon made the floor boards shimmer like an ocean of silk. It drifted over Tomoe softening the distortion of her beautiful face in a slow tide of light and shadow. Finally, unwillingly, Kenshin slept.

Pale, white plum blossom filled the air around him, swirling in little eddies like snow before the wind. Slowly it fell, then melted away, and he found himself kneeling in the snow once again. In cold, deep, snow beneath a canopy of bare trees. He should have been cold, but somehow he wasn't. Blood trickled down his face staining his clothes with red, yet he felt nothing. All around him, there was red. The snow was red, his hands were red, his clothes, and his face. All red, as red as his own hair. He stared up at the gunmetal grey clouds, heavy with unfallen snow. The clouds closed in pressing down on the trees above, until their oppressive burden out weighed the weight in his lap.

The weight in his lap….Tomoe lay in his lap, her kimono soaked in blood. Blood and white plum filled his nostrils and the stillness settled around him. The whole world seemed encompassed by a heavy blanketing silence. He stroked Tomoe's face and trembled. He was, it seemed, inevitably and endlessly imprisoned in this moment. This single moment of regret and agony, of a pain more piercing than anything he'd ever known. He couldn't escape. Nothing moved. His breath steamed on the air. Above the silence all he could hear was his heart beating in his ears.

So quiet. The sound of boots crunching through snow shattered the silence like ice cracking across a lake. He jerked his head up and the world swung round wildly. A hysterical blur of red and white.

"Didn't I tell you that the Hiten Misturugi would make you a mass murderer!"

He snapped into wakefulness his heart thudding, eyes wide. Hiko's voice pounding in his skull. Not for the first time he felt physically ill. He could hear himself, in his mind, his voice filled with certainty. 'The happiness you lost once, in all this violence. I'll protect it this time for you.' How foolish he'd beenand yet worse still was that other time, at the inn in Kyoto. He could still hear himself, his voice taunt with desperation. 'I thought about my answer. Whether I would have killed you, if you had had a sword. The answer is no. I wouldn't kill you. Whatever happened, I could never do that to you. Not to you . . . Never.' He'd believed it too but the evidence of his own poor judgement lay silent and still at his feet. He stared at the floor his finger tracing the raw wound on his face. Ironically, it was starting to heal.

He stood up stiffly, an old man suddenly where a boy should have been, and peered out the window at the garden lying dormant beneath its silver white blanket. The fragments of a thousand conversations spilled out of his memory. Their world had been one of silence. They were both quiet, speaking only at need. Yet they had communicated with a thousand silent gestures. The tilt of a head, the flick of an eyebrow, or a steady questioning gaze, it was enough. Those eyes filled with so many things, with dark lights in their depths that he could not read. Warmth, calm, helplessness and something else. Rather like a sort of agonised confusion, that slipped away eel quick whenever he unexpectedly met her eyes. There was a memory of her on her knees in the snow. She'd fallen as they hurried her geta catching on a stone hidden by the snow, gazing up at him with a sort of helpless surprise and startlement, that wouldn't leave him. In that moment he'd loved her almost compulsively. He couldn't believe that it was he, himself, Himura Kenshin who'd extinguished forever the light in those deep, dark eyes. He couldn't get past it and it made him feel ill.

She had had the most profound effect on his life. That beautiful, remote girl who had stood in the alleyway, her kimono splattered with blood, staring at him. 'In plays they always say, "A rain of blood fell" . . . But you really made it rain blood.' Things had begun to change even then, because all he had been able to do was stare at her, flat footed and indecisive. It had never happened before. The sword had dropped from his nerveless fingers and he'd gazed into her eyes, bloodied, panting and shocked to the core. He'd been rushing forward then with each black envelope and each passing day towards the final fracturing of his own mind. He had drowned his inner calm with a ceaseless rain of blood, until it dripped down his sword and soaked into his skin leaving him increasingly restless and aggressive. Somehow, Tomoe alone had pierced his growing agitation.

He closed his eyes. The breeze from the window fluttered past his face. Tomoe had always been very kind. He knew, he was intimidating yet she had only ever once seemed afraid of him and that had only been a flash of terror over the glint of a blade held against her throat. She was undoubtedly brusque, but her words had penetrated the haze in his mind as nothing else could. Tomoe, he knew had had steel in her spine. Though she was beautiful and delicate, she was strong. Strong in a way he had often felt he wasn't. At first she had irritated him, frustrated him and left him feeling decidedly unbalanced. Her words had shaken him, and made him question everything he did. How he'd hated it. He'd tried to push her away fending her off with his own brand of abrupt, rude arrogance. It hadn't worked she would only look at him, her eyes very dark completely unfazed by his behaviour. Behaviour that had sent most people scuttling away. Slowly strangely, amidst all that killing he had found himself listening for her. Looking for her out of the corner of his eyes while he pretended not to. While the world outside had grown more and more unstable and violent the world within his own mind had slowly grown calmer. He sighed. All around him the darkness and silence settled all the more deeply. The moon started to sink behind the mountains, leaving everything in darkness. This hour of darkness between the light of day and night had always seemed to last an age in Kyoto. But time moved differently here. Indeed time had moved differently since that day.

On a small curving bridge with Kyoto smouldering around them time had changed. From the moment, he had looked at her and found that he didn't want her to leave. His world had changed.

He'd stood there with his hand held out to her. His clumsy proposal hanging in the air between them, while her eyes had gazed up at him in complete surprise. 'I don't know how long it will last, but . . . It doesn't have to be for show. Together . . . Till death do us part.' He could still feel the unexpectedly rapid thud of his heart as she'd stood there looking at him in complete surprise. Time had stood still then as the ash laden air drifted around them. On that small arched bridge surrounded by the smouldering remanets of a great city the tension seemed unbearable. Never had any single word mattered more. When she'd quietly accepted, time had restarted but it had changed. It no longer travelled in jerks and starts broken up by black envelopes and bloodshed, but flowed seamlessly one day to the next in an endless stream. Until he lost count of the days. Perhaps he thought that's what happiness was.

Tomoe had given it to him. To he whose life mattered not at all, she had been given this thing freely. Deep down he knew he did not deserve it but he was grateful all the same. He owed her something. He could not protect her happiness as he had promised for he had stolen her life with his own hands. Nor could he die and go back on the promise that he had given to Katsura. He exhaled and opened his eyes to stare out at the black world beyond the window. A draft of wind blew his hair against the wound on his cheek.

Kenshin remembered the way Tomoe's fingers had slipped so lightly, so cautiously over it. It had been dark then too, her hands and eyes had been both curious and sad at the same time. Their touch had drawn some strange emotion out of him, an odd blend of responsibility, protectiveness and earnestness. 'One man can't hope to change an era alone. The only thing he can do is protect the happiness of the people he sees before him, one by one. But before that--my days as a Hitokiri will go on. . . . I want to find a way to protect others without taking life. While finding a way to atone for the crime of stealing other's happiness with my own hands.' He closed his fingers into a tight fist and looked back across the room, perhaps he could not keep his word exactly how he would have liked but…. In the end when finally, the new age came he could at least keep that part of his promise to her. It was the only thing he could offer her and some how he would find a way to uphold it.

(2006)