2.

It had never, ever, been an easy thing to get the better of Hiko Seijuro XIII. Master swordsman. Master potter. Nobody could beat him in a sword fight. Including his former apprentice, who was the only person who even came close. Plus he had fast become the most sought after potter in the entire district, even into Kyoto. Especially in the art of kintsugi. He had an overbearing sense of self confidence that often spilled over into arrogance and conceit.

Rightly so, he really was that good.

This, however, left him open mouthed for a moment in astonished shock. It all suddenly began making horrible sense. The child's height, build and, god forbid, now that he noticed, they only had on a juban, a robe, and the haori, no hakama. The dirty and decrepit haori reached to the ankles. The high pitch in what whisper he could understand. It all added up.

This time he didn't stop himself from running a hand down his face as he grabbed the hilt of his katana in a tight grip. The girl sucked in a breath of terror, dropping back into her deep bow, reaching up to grab her head. He looked at her a second, startled, and realized she thought he was going to...

"No," he abruptly corrected. With a pause he added, "Not sama. Shishou. You call me shishou. For the time being."

After a moment the huddled little girl slowly lifted her head and looked at him, fear and bewilderment on her face. She still had her fingers threaded into her matted hair.

"Shishou-sama?" she whispered and dropped her head back down.

"No, you little baka," he corrected, "Just shishou. What's your name?" He asked firmly. He had to cut through this ultra subservience, fast.

A haunted grief-filled look appeared on her face as she shook her head. "Forgive me, shi... shi... shishou," she whispered, "Shiranai," she kept tapping the palm of her hand against her forehead. "I don't know!"

Why was he getting the feeling that a deep dark hole was opening up underneath him?

Hiko pondered that as he stared at the girl. This was not going to happen again! He'd simply known, that day, (was it over 25 years ago?) when he had encountered eight year old Shinta that he'd found the apprentice he'd been seeking to teach the Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu. He'd promptly given the boy a new name. Kenshin.

This, however, was not going to happen! One way or another he was going to get this child off his mountain and into the hands of the police, or an orphanage, or whatever, as fast as he possibly could.

"On'nanoko..." he muttered. It would suffice. No way was he giving this child a name. Decision made, he stood up again.

"Come on, girl," he ordered. "Follow me." He immediately headed for the stairs leading back down towards the path to his hut. He barely heard the sound of the girl scuffling in the dirt behind him, when he reached the stairs and began the decent down.

Lost enough in his thoughts, mostly all very annoyed, angry, and nursing a fat grudge against the powers that be, he failed at first to register if she was behind him or not. Not hearing anything right away, he slowed and turned, stopping between steps, and looked back.

Hiko dropped his head, his shoulders sagging in defeat. Reaching up, he pinched the bridge of his nose. He wondered if he had anywhere near enough saké left in his considerably replenished stock to drink away the headache that threatened to split his skull in two.

At the top of the stairs, the girl was taking each step painstakingly slow. Dropping to one knee, setting one foot down, limping very badly on the other, barely balancing on the heel of that one. She tottered badly as she regained her balance, before starting the process over. At that rate it would take her all night just to get to the bottom of the stairs.

Come to think of it...

Hiko scowled, shaking his head. It had to have taken her all day to get back up to that shrine after raiding his place. Hadn't she fallen over when he had let go of her after the second dunking in the pool? There'd also been the blood traces that had led him up there to begin with.

"I'm getting old..." he grumbled, turning around and heading back up the steps. Stopping at eye level to the child he looked at her, disgruntled to say the least.

"What is it?" He demanded. It was getting too dark to see just what could be wrong, but he knew something wasn't good about her foot, it looked swollen, now that he thought about it.

She just stopped, teetering on her one good foot, looking dejected. "Splinter, shishou," she whispered.

He tried hard, really hard, not to groan out loud. Some how, some way, some one was going to pay for all of this. In the most unpleasant ways he could think of. He heaved a sigh, turned around and crouched.

"Climb on," he ordered. "And don't grab my throat," he added, shifting his katana further back.

After a moment's pause he felt her hands on his shoulders. She was a feather, lighter even than that pack he had hauled up from his trip to the village. He twisted slightly, adjusting her left leg over the o-katana's hilt, letting her get wedged between where it and the obi met at his waist, before looping his arm around that same leg. The right appeared to be the painful one, if her wincing in pain was any indication. At least this way, he could keep his sword arm reasonably free. Not that he'd need to, nobody would dare confront him on his mountain. He just shifted her more over to the left then stood up.

Two little fists gripped the thick woven cloth of his mantle at his collarbones. She was, however, still stiff with tension and fear of him. Heaving a sigh, Hiko began walking down the stairs, barely registering the weight of the child. "Just relax," he grumbled, "I'm not going to hurt you. When we get back to my hut, you're going into the furo. All right?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"Yes what?" He growled.

"Shishou."

"That's better," he rumbled. He curled his arm under her knee, and just through that contact he could feel heat coming off her leg. That wasn't good. "Do you know where your parents are?"

He could feel her shake her head, followed by a hesitantly whispered, "Iie, shishou."

Making much faster progress down the stairs, he began prodding for information. Were you with your parents? Were you with slavers? Were you with family? Had you been taken? Every single question he asked was followed by 'I don't know.' Worse, it seemed to just upset her more and more. She was absolutely rigid, still scared, terrified if anything. She trembled against his back. He could feel her hands shaking where they gripped his mantle.

He switched tactics. "You can bathe yourself, right?" he asked.

"Yes, shishou."

"How about washing dishes, can you do that?" Another affirmative. What followed from his more subtler tactics was a list of simple chores. Someone had at least been raising the girl. Somehow or another they'd also taught her how to hide herself and any presence she left behind.

An uncomfortable feeling about that niggled at the back of his skull.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he veered right, plunging into the undergrowth and headed for his hut.

"How old are you? Do you know that?" he asked gruffly.

"S... Six, shishou." She didn't sound one hundred percent sure.

He barely succeeded in hiding the groan of put-upon despair that threatened to escape him. Great, he thought, a six year old girl! His coaxing answers from her did result in a fractional relaxation. She wasn't shaking quite so bad, but still feared him. Good, he pondered gloomily, keep that thought, kid!

It didn't take him long to get back to his home. Once there he slung the child off his hip, depositing her on the floor next to the fire pit, which had burnt back down to just embers when he had left to climb to the top of the mountain. He reached up to his neck, unhooking the cords that kept the cowl up on his mantle then pulled the whole thing off, dropping it onto the hook by his door.

"Sit there and don't move." He said gruffly, pulling the o-katana free. He set it on the floor at the head of his unmade futon.

She didn't need to be told twice, thank the gods for that. She simply dropped where he had set her. Ignoring her for the moment, he set about rebuilding the fire, and lit a few candles in the process before he turned and got a real, proper look at her.

Appalled didn't quite cover how he felt.

He knew she was filthy, but he barely controlled the horror he felt when he realized that a lot of the dirt on her face and legs was simply dried blood. A great streak of it ran down one side of her face and well into the hair line. Which explained the matt in her short-cropped hair. The haori she wore was also stained. Same with her knees and feet. Both knees where skinned, no doubt from the climb up the stairs.

His gaze dropped to her feet.

The right was swollen. Reaching down he gripped her foot at the ankle.

The girl let out a harsh gasp of pain, trying to scramble backwards as he lifted her foot to see.

"Hold still!" He snapped at her. With a growing dread, he could see where an enormous splinter, it had to be bamboo, had sunk into the flesh just under her toes and into her foot. It was oozing blood, and possibly more. He could feel the fever in the skin. The wound was dirty and had to have been very painful.

"How did this happen?!" he growled looking at her.

She trembled, in pain and in fright, and dropped her head.

Hiko heaved an aggravated sigh. "I know, you don't remember.." he grumbled. He let her foot go and glared at her for a moment. What the hell had happened to this kid? He reached over and lifted her chin again, examining her face in the better light. Sure enough he could make out tell tale bruising in her hair line.

"Your head?" he asked, "Does it hurt?"

Large very dark eyes stared back at him before she nodded her head slowly, not saying a word. The little creature looked exhausted under the dirt and dried blood. It was getting to be too much effort to even talk. As an after thought, he reached up and tugged the collar of her haori aside exposing her throat. Sure enough, there was bruising there too. Worse, it was a suspicious looking bruising.

She shrank back away from him, trembling and beginning to breath hard in sheer fright. It wasn't hard for him to miss. She thought he was going to hurt her. Or possibly do even worse...

"What did I tell you earlier?" He asked. "I'm not going to hurt you. Understand?"

She barely lifted her head, staring at him. There wasn't an ounce of trust in those eyes.

Hiko gave up. "Just stay right there. Don't move," he grumbled, rising to his feet.

She obeyed him to the letter. Not moving as he disappeared outside with a torch. Presently he returned and slid back the shoji to the little storage room. He disappeared inside, rummaging around in the larger chests he had in there. When he emerged, holding several bundles of cloth, he looked at the pathetic creature where she sat. She had bent over, holding her forehead in one hand and her foot with the other. She slowly rocked back and forth.

She jumped like a scared little rabbit when he stopped by her side.

"Stand up," he said gruffly.

With effort, she got back onto her feet, wobbling badly, rolling her bad foot to one side to keep off the wound.

"Put your arm around my neck, but don't grab my throat," he ordered.

She nodded, managing a barely there 'Yes, Shishou,' before he bent slightly and scooped her up off the ground and onto his hip. She let out a startled gasp and clutched at his robes as he swept out of the room.

A single torch was burning behind the hut where a large wooden ofuro had been set up. It was ingeniously fed water by a series of thick bamboo tubes leading from the creek up the incline behind the hut. He had a small fire going as well, where a pot of warming water sat.

Seeing where he was heading, the girl suddenly twisted, pushing away from him, "No! No... Nooo!" she started to protest.

"Stop!" he snapped. "It's just the bath. Not that deep."

"No!" She gasped before he twisted around and dumped her, clothes and all, into the water.

Normally one washed first before getting into a furo. This, however, wasn't normal. She absolutely clung to his robes, nearly pulling him into the water as well. Grunting with annoyance, he reached up with his free hand and pried her hand away, wrapping it around the edge of the ofuro. She started to hyperventilate in fright.

"Stop," he ordered again, looking her in the eyes. "Hold onto the edge and calm down!" He pulled her other hand away, curling it next to the other. She shook so hard the water in the tub, up to her stomach, actually sloshed. She stood there, looking bewildered a moment, and looked down, realizing the water was actually warm.

"See..." he said. "It's not that bad. Now sit down."

It took a few minutes, to his everlasting annoyance, to get her to calm down enough to actually sit in the tub. He left her there to soak, before finally convincing her to tilt her head back. Letting the matt of dried blood and dirt in her hair soften up.

He added another bucket of warm water, before refilling it, then picked up a lump of home made herb soap he preferred from a local villager.

"Now, I'm going to get that mat out of your hair." He explained carefully, "After that, get out of those clothes, and scrub yourself from head to toe."

The bundle of cloth he had brought out of the closet were towels and a very old set of Kenshin's robes from when he had been a boy. Hiko wondered why the hell he had kept them all these years, but was glad he had now.

"There's a towel and clothes here. When your done, rinse off with the water in the bucket." He nodded at the pot warming over the fire. "And get dressed. Then just wait for me here..."

Silent as an owl, she nodded her head.

Once he got the tangled of hair cleaned up, he could easily feel a long welt where she either hit or was hit by something that had caused the head wound. Whoever she had been with had kept her hair cut short. A mark of shame for women and girls.

That niggling at the back of his thoughts began again. He had suspicions as to why that was so.

Satisfied that her head at least was clean and pest free, he left her alone to attend to the rest and went back into the hut. She needed somewhere to sleep, and he had a nasty little operation needing to be performed on that foot. A situation guaranteed to a be an unpleasant ordeal for them both. He was mulling that over as he set up a billet of blankets on the floor in the storage closet. Heh had a number of things needing to get set up before he performed what would amount to battlefield surgery.

Which is exactly as it ended up being. That foot was a whole lot worse than anticipated, taking him much longer that he wanted to get at the entirety of the splinter. Then it needed to be cleaned out as best as possible.

The girl, to his great surprise, never actually passed out from the pain, though getting her to keep still as he had to cut into the flesh of her foot proved to be a challenge. He had to wrap his arm around her leg, to keep her foot still with one hand as he cut and cleaned with the other. She'd bitten hard into a folded up rag, trying to plead with him to stop, and she literally left bruises on his upper arm where she gripped in an effort to keep still.

By the time that he had sluiced the wound out with saké, then firmly wrapped her foot in bandages, she lay completely spent, involuntarily crying from the sheer pain of it. Her whole body wracked in sobs.

She lay there on the mat beside the irori, tears rolling down her face, sucking in air past the rag she had bitten into. Her hands still clutched the fabric of his robe, when he twisted around, gently setting her foot back down.

Unconsciously he reached over, setting one hand on her forehead, reaching over and taking the rag out of her mouth. "I'm done. Calm down, on'nanoko. It's all over, just calm down." He murmured as she feebly squirmed her head away, she couldn't even open her eyes at that point. She could only lay there and cry.

He let her, stroking the top of her head before he realized what he was doing and snatched his hand away with a scowl. What the hell was he thinking? Hiko pulled her hands from off his sleeve. He grudgingly started cleaning up the mess, getting his home back into some sort of order, before starting some water boiling in the firepit.

Brewing up a tea he knew would help fight infections, he turned back towards the child. He scooped her up carefully, shifting her to the little billet he'd created from blankets inside his storage room. She wasn't fully out of it yet, a testament to her stamina, yet was clearly beyond exhausted. Getting a small saucer of the tea, he sat her up and coaxed it into her.

"Go to sleep, on'nanoko..." he rumbled at her, when he laid her back down. "I might be gone when you wake, but don't go anywhere. You're safe in here."

She barely cracked her eyes open, nodding her head, unable to keep her eyes open at all. He settled a blanket over her. Before he could even get up she managed to whisper. "Shishou?"

"What? Didn't I just say go to sleep?" He said sternly, looking at the little figure.

She let out a long sigh, her body trembling before growing still. "Arigato..." she managed to whisper before drifting away.

He sat there for a very long moment, his lips twisted in a thoughtful moue. He finally sighed himself, reaching out to feel her forehead. He wasn't surprised to note it was warm.

"I'm a damned fool!" He muttered under his breath as he stood up and moved over to the door way, snatching up his mantle. He turned and snagged up the o-katana next. This night was going to be a complete waste.


"Well," the village doctor said to him. "You're not wrong in your assessments."

He looked up from his little patient to face Hiko, who stood just behind the man. "That's got to be amnesia you're dealing with, from the head wound. In all probability too, someone tried to silence her." The doctor held his hand up to his own throat, placing his thumb on his larynx. "My guess, just from what I can feel, is the larynx is crushed. She may or may not recover her voice given time. You've done a fine job of cleaning out that splinter wound, too."

"Of course," Hiko growled. "I've tended my fair share of battle wounds. I just needed to know if my hunch was correct. That's why I fetched you."

The doctor sighed, giving Hiko a glance of annoyance before he stood back up. The little girl hadn't even woke up as she was being examined by the doctor.

"There's quite possibly a fracture under that wound on her skull. You made a good call in not moving her. I'd suggest strongly you just let her recover here. The memory may return on its own, or it may not. Children will surprise you sometimes. As for the foot, I have a balm I made here, it has several oils and tinctures in it to help fight infections. Keep applying it, as far into the wound as you can go. And let it drain." He pulled out a small pot with a firmly tied on lid, from his supplies.

He chuckled. "I think that's one of your pots," he commented as he handed it to Hiko. "Keep giving her that tea too. One of my wife's isn't it?" he asked, not really expecting an answer. "She needs feeding, too underweight, and rest, lots of it. Little thing is way too exhausted. Never seen a child sleep through an entire examination."

Hiko, if anything, was not in a mood to chatter. Come to think of it, the doctor mused quietly, Hiko never was. He still stood there, arms crossed and looking sour.

"If you see any red streaks on that leg, or if the toes begin to discolour, come and get me. We may need to remove the foot." The doctor heaved a sigh, glancing at the man. "Would you like me to let the police know about this? Maybe ask around town? See if anyone knows about a missing child?"

Hiko pondered on that a moment.

"Discreetly," he finally said, tapping his fingers on the o-katana's handle. "And don't involve the police. Don't let anyone in town know there's a kid up here. Just see if anyone, any group, is missing a child. I have my suspicions who she was with but I have no proof."

"Care to elaborate on that?" the doctor asked. Hiko just glared at him. The doctor sighed. "Have I never been discreet enough for your tastes, Hiko-san?" The doctor asked.

"Loose lips and a single act of carelessness have caused wars," Hiko replied.

"Over a slip of a girl? I highly doubt that. Girls certainly aren't as valuable as boys. You ought to know about that one."

"Kenshin was my apprentice," Hiko grumbled.

"He was still a valuable child. And look what happened there..."

"Your point?" Hiko asked sharply.

The doctor sighed, both of them were tired, neither having slept. Hiko had come down from his mountain in the middle of the night to fetch the man. "Boy children are more valuable, Hiko-san. You know that yourself. Nobody wants to put up with or deal with girls, especially little ones like this. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she wasn't cast out by her family as one mouth too many. They may have even tried to kill her to rid them of their problem."

"So how about you discreetly ask if any of the villagers in the region are suddenly missing a six year old?" Hiko fired back, knowing full well the doctor was probably right. Though that strange niggling in the back of his mind still hadn't faded away.

"All right, Hiko-san, I'll ask around. I assume you'll want her gone when she recovers enough?"

"What do you think?!" Hiko snapped. "Do I look like I am capable of raising a girl? Not only is that not happening, its a ridiculous waste of my talents!"

"So why bother trying to save her?" The doctor bluntly asked. "Thinking of sending her to an orphanage? She'll probably end up a prostitute or a house slave, possibly even an opium addict. If she's lucky. What kind of life is that? It may have been more merciful to just let nature take its course."

Hiko's eyes widened in both horror and ire. "Lives are precious you know..." He growled. "You're a doctor!" He scolded.

"Says the man who lives by the sword."

"Every person I have ever encountered was given a choice." Hiko shot back, unrepentant. He pointed a finger at the girl. "That on'nanoko deserves a choice too."

"Well," the doctor said gathering his belongings up. "She's going to be living here with you, for a while anyway. She's not going to be walking anytime soon on that foot, and who knows what will happen with the head injuries. All of that is dependant on if she survives the infections and fever."

The doctor stood up straight, looking up at Hiko. "You've got your work cut out for you for the next few weeks."

Hiko mulled all of this over in his head as he walked back up his mountain for the what had to be the fourth time in 36 hours. He'd escorted the doctor home, had to, it still being dark out. He'd made certain that the doctor would be discreet in his inquiries.

He then added that if word got out around the village that Hiko Seijuro XIII was-temporarily-caring for a little girl he'd know who the rumours came from. He would also deal it accordingly. No sense letting the rest of the world know what kind of indignity was being heaped on his shoulders. No way would he end up being the subject of anyone's jokes.

Returning back, pre-dawn barely lit the skies to the east. Constantly, on the solitary walking down and back he wondered what the hell he thought he was doing.

Entering the hut at last, he paused in the genken to remove his waraji's, pulling the mantle off and stepped up into the house. The girl, he was relieved to notice, had burrowed under her blanket and never moved when he silently knelt beside her. A quick check told him she was feverish and the flesh around her foot and ankle was still hot to the touch. He sighed, standing back up, pulling his katana free and set it near his bed.

Without much further ado, he dropped down onto his shikibuton with a heavy sigh, closing his eyes and wondered again what he'd gotten himself into.