A/N – Here we go with chapter 3. Have been watching many (too many) Hong Kong martial arts movies and I'm in a strange mood –

Disclaimer – I don't own Ruroken. Don't sue.


Chapter 3


Genzai's precious Kaoru had a stubborn streak, Kenjiro was fast discovering, and it manifested at the very worst moments. They couldn't afford to stand here, arguing about this –

"You cannot go back to your hotel room, Miss Kamiya," he argued, "They will be watching for your return."

She began to speak, to argue, as she had been doing for the last two minutes, but stopped – finally, she heard what he had noticed long before: the scrape of footsteps on stone, of metal tapped slowly, tauntingly against the alley walls.

He stood with his back to them, sheltering the girl. But he was aware of their every movement – the heavily muscled strong man circling to his right, betraying his position with his harsh breathing; the small, silent knife-man whose rustling clothes gave away his movement to the left; and the leader, the swordsman, tapping the alley walls, trying to disorientate him.

"Oh, there's no need to leave on our account," one of them called out, taunting, in heavily accented English. "We can finish our business right here and now."

Kaoru looked up at him, her eyes wide. He smiled crookedly, hoping that it looked reassuring – and then he turned, slowly revealing himself – his red hair, his amber eyes, and his cross-shaped scar…

The small, silent man sneered. "Himura Kenshin," he said in Japanese. "A renegade, honourless assassin. How much did the Americans pay you to betray your teachings?"

Kenjiro's eyes flashed for a moment, before he regained control and smiled. "How much is Enishi paying you to take me on?" he taunted in turn, falling automatically into a balanced fighting stance, slowly circling, stalking, always aware of his opponents' movements. "Is it enough to die for?"

"You're bluffing," the leader said abruptly, and Kenjiro's eyes flew to his. "You're unarmed, cornered, and you have to keep the girl at your back. I, Sakamoto Genji, will take your head and collect Yukishiro-sama's reward –"

To his left, the small man rushed him, knife extended to stab. Kenjiro's arm swept out, grabbed the man's wrist, and twisted; the man screamed, dropped the knife, and Kenjiro smashed his fist into his face. He dropped, groaning, clutching his shattered wrist and teeth. Kenjiro turned back to Sakamoto Genji in time to sweep Kaoru further behind him, shifting his feet and eluding the sword that would have cut him in two.

They stared at each other a while longer, then, eyes locking, a test of resolve and will. Kenjiro shifted his stance, sinking a little lower; Sakamoto gripped his sword, holding it high, parallel to his cheek.

"Your stance is flawed," Sakamoto said, stepping closer. "Your kung fu is weak."

Kenjiro blinked, thought he heard a stifled giggle from the girl behind him. "Do I look like Bruce Lee?" he countered.

"Well…" the strong man began, his first contribution to the conversation.

"Shut up!" Sakamoto shouted, his eyes narrowing. Things were not unfolding as he had planned; his victim was not cowering in fright, or falling to the ground pleading for Yukishiro-sama's mercy.

But in that moment of distraction, Kenjiro moved. He charged forward, quickly getting inside Sakamoto's range, and, grabbing his wrists in a sudden, iron grip, wrested the sword from him –

Pivoted, turned, brought the sword down in a powerful, implacable sweep, and did not flinch at the warm spray of blood as Sakamoto's body collapsed, his head rolling to a stop by the wall of the alley.

He looked up, straight into Kaoru's wide, shocked blue eyes, feeling the all-too-familiar sensation of blood dripping down his face. Her eyes slid past him, widened, and he pivoted again to meet the strong man's lumbering rush. At the moment of intersection, he sidestepped, lifted his sword and struck, the classic downwards strike that all kendo students learned from the very, very beginning.

There was a choked, bubbling scream, and the huge, hard muscles went lax, that immensely strong, finely honed body no more than a ruptured, bleeding sack now. The strong man stumbled to his knees, wavered, and collapsed, dead.

Casually, Kenjiro flicked the blood off the blade, and began to turn; he heard the small, silent man scramble to his feet, panicking, and sprint off. His instincts, honed over too much killing and too many deaths, screamed at him to follow him, run him down, and finish him off, but Kaoru put a hand on his arm, staying him.

"He'll only alert the others," he told her. "They'll all come after us now."

"It doesn't matter," she answered, voice shaking a little. "He was no threat to you, and they would have come after us anyway."

Her face was pale, but her eyes were steady, if shadowed with the terrible knowledge of just how suddenly death could strike. He did not say, as he had been thinking, that ten years ago he would have killed the man, rendered harmless or not –

Let her cherish her illusions while she could. There would be precious few left by the time this ridiculous game was played out…

"Let's go," he said, stepping delicately around the two bloody corpses, bending down to retrieve the sheath for his borrowed sword, and taking a moment to wipe and sheath the blade, treating it with the respect it deserved.

As they prepared to emerge back onto the main street, Kaoru stopped him. "Wait." He turned to her in surprise, but she only reached up, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief, wiping the crimson, drying blood from his skin.


Her handkerchief was ruined. It was the only thing she could seem to focus on; her thoughts were skittering randomly between the memory of the two men he had killed with such shocking speed and brutality, the feel of his tense, vibrating strength under her hand, and the memory of his cool, amused voice as he spoke.

Do I look like Bruce Lee?

She had never before seen such skill with a Japanese sword. Kaoru had studied kendo for nearly ten years, but had somehow never before understood that swords were, in fact, nothing more than killing weapons. In her mind, skill with a blade had meant grace, balance, art – but never the warm iron tang of blood, or the choked, terrifying gurgle of a man's last dying breath.

"Mr. Hamill?" she asked, walking down the street with him, trying to pretend that they were another pair of holidaying tourists.

"Please," he said dryly, "call me Ken. I think we've gone beyond the point of formality."

"Where did you learn to use a sword like that?"

He was silent. Kaoru cursed herself for prying, and determined that from now on, she would restrain her damnable curiosity –

"My Japanese grandfather," he answered finally. "The Hiten Mitsurugi sword style was passed down from father to son for hundreds of years in our family, but my uncles all died in the war. Because my mother was the eldest daughter, and I her only son, he determined that I was to be the inheritor…"

She remembered the swordsman's derogatory words in the alley.

How much did the Americans pay you to betray your teachings?

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, giving his left arm a tiny, sympathetic squeeze. He looked down at her, eyes widened in surprise, and then he smiled at her – a genuinely warm, rather endearingly awkward smile, and covered her hand with his own.


1972

"Kenjiro!" his mother said, opening the door to him and smiling, holding her arms out wide to embrace him. Almost desperately, he hugged her, breathing in her familiar scent – this was what he had been fighting for, all these long years.

"How is he, Okaa-san?" he asked, deeply concerned. His grandfather had been admitted to hospital in Kyoto with terminal lung cancer, and Kenjiro had begged Katsura for three weeks leave.

His mother said nothing, turning and going into the house; disquieted, Kenjiro followed, removing his shoes and closing the door behind him.

"He is dying, Ken," she said, her face impassive. Only the pain in her eyes gave any clue to her emotional state – his grandfather's fierce pride and self-control, drummed into all his children. He had never managed to succeed with Kenjiro, though…

Ken put out a hand, staggered. "Dying? Why didn't you tell me before this?"

"He told me not to," she said, her voice gentle, as always; no, his mother's voice was always cool and gentle, never raised, never angry, never anything but calm. "You know how stubborn he is. He's never forgiven you for using the Hiten Mitsurugi for the army."

This was an old, old argument. When Kenjiro had first told his grandfather of his role in the shadow war, the old man had been furious – Kenjiro, just as furious with what he saw as the old man's failure to understand, had walked out, his grandfather's words of disownment ringing in his ears.


The memory of his grandfather's death was still painful even now, more than ten years later. He'd loved the haughty, stubborn old man like a second father, had soaked up his teachings and his philosophy and worked at his kenjutsu until his palms bled to gain his approval. But in the end, he had betrayed him, seduced by promises of a quick, easy solution to ills that would never be fixed…

The warm press of Kaoru's hand on his arm drew him back, and he grinned down at her like a fool, just glad that she was here, and that she cared.

Deliberately, he banished the past, concentrating instead on the problem of where, exactly, they would go to ground for the night. He had been in Bangkok for eight years, and he knew it fairly well – but not nearly as well as the criminal syndicates Enishi would call on did. He kept to himself, lived a solitary, introspective life, and so he had no real friends –

But there were others he could turn to for help.

He was not the only ex-pat soldier in Bangkok. There were a number of other veterans who had decided to stay, after the end; either because they had nothing left for them at home, or because they had been home and found that they no longer fit in. He didn't associate with them, didn't gather at their bars or their nightspots, but they were bound together by shared experience: they had all gone through a particular kind of hell on earth, and had survived – if barely – to emerge in a world that had moved on without them.

And so they stuck together, as they had done in the jungle.


The rapping continued, relentlessly, thundering throughout the small, shabby one-room apartment. The lean, lanky figure sprawled face down across the bed twitched, groaned, and then rolled over, burying his head further into the sheets.

"Sano!" a voice called, rapping even harder on the door. "Wake up! Sano!"

In the depths of Sano's hung-over, sleep-hazed mind, it seemed as though he recognized that voice, as if he should remember it –

A firm hand on his shoulder, urging him up, away, as he stared shocked at the remains of his patrol…

A lethal whirlwind, protecting him, pushing him down as the gunfire came from all around, and somehow they managed to escape, the older man dragging him all the way…

A hip flask and an enameled-eagle Zippo, ready to listen to a young, terrified kid unwillingly drafted into a war he didn't want, fighting for reasons he didn't understand…

A concerned voice calling, always calling, disturbing his wonderful dreams, slapping his face and trying to tear him away from the glorious haze…

"Sano!"

"All right, all right," he growled, "Jesus, I'm coming." Stretching, he rubbed at his bleary eyes and ambled, clad in nothing but a pair of stained Y-fronts, to the front door and pulled it open.

He recognized him immediately, though it had been five years since he'd last seen him, walking away as, blind drunk and dangerously high, Sano hurled a torrent of filthy abuse at his back. "Ken," he said quietly.

"Sano," the other man replied, shifting to reveal the girl. She was young and pretty, Sano saw, distracted, but there were bloodstains on her hands, and the smell of fresh blood in the air, surrounding Ken. He looked closer and saw the way that Ken was standing, left foot forward deliberately, hiding something against his right side.

"You smell of blood," he said deliberately, almost accusingly.

Ken bowed his head, lifting his right hand, extending a sword – a goddamned sword! –

"We need your help. Will you let us in?"

Sano stood in the doorway, looking into those familiar golden eyes, remembering the ever-present rumours of his true role in the war, dark whispers of assassination, of conspiracies, and of drug smuggling, and the hard, unmistakable evidence of the blood-drenched sword.

And then he remembered the steadfast understanding, offered freely to a kid on the edge of despair, the friendship that had kept him coming back again and again, trying to help him despite his abuse and contempt, until, in the end, Sano himself had driven him away…

"Come in," he said abruptly, "and tell me what the hell's going on. Anything you want, you know I'll help you."

Ken, leading the girl into his wreck of a living room, turned his head and smiled sadly, sweetly. "Thank you, Sano."


A/N – Please tell me what you think. Thanks for reading.