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CHAPTER 5 : Absent Minds and Missing Pieces
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Yuki had been followed all day by a little cloud of memories that led back to her new male handyman.
Little details like the pauses he'd made in speaking with her, the exact color of his hair, the sadness in his eyes: everything was running circles in her mind to the point that she couldn't even remember if she'd remembered to peel the daikon radish for dinner. As a result, she'd found three piles of paper-thin daikon slices swirling on the chopping board like blossoms- two too many to be used that night, and now they'd most likely have to be thrown out.
The caretaker shook her head, sending strings of black bangs swishing back and forth as she went for a waste bin. Damn it to the depths, Yuki. Do your job! He's a just a boy, and you are no blushing schoolgirl!
"...I mean, he makes all of them act like blushing schoolgirls! What does he expect to get done down there with the kitchen maids? He's a warrior, not a house cleaner!"
Yuki stopped piling the scraps into a waste basket, eyes wide as she caught the words of three men who had just walked by the covered entryway.
Warrior?
As a busy, mature, well-bred housekeeper, Ms. Matsumoto was not the type to eavesdrop, but there was no way that the trio was talking about anyone other than the red-haired mystery she'd been trying to unravel all day. The woman hunkered down behind her deep blue noren curtains and tried not to let her paring knife clack on the wooden tray as she gently laid it down. Yuki turned toward the hall, straining to catch their exchange over the din of wooden cooking utensils preparing dinner behind her in the recesses of kitchen:
"Come now, Yamagata-san, he's dealing with a lot right now. You know what this city does to him, you saw him the other night. I'd say it's dubious that nine of every ten street corners in Kyoto doesn't house his victim's spirits."
Yuki's thoughts froze into a viscous, sludgy lump in her head. They weren't talking about...?
A heavy sigh from Yamagata. "I know. But I just don't know if he can survive in a place like this. Look, as much as I want his help with our soldiers, if he does fight, it will come from patient, reasonable discourse, not the threat of discharge. Do you want a young man like that on the street, starving with the rest of the beggars when he could be making us the strongest fighting force in the country?"
"No. And you're right, we can't force anything on him. He's torn up but good. If he heals well, he might still be able to fight for us in the future."
"Did you ever see how he avoids that bridge to the east?" a slightly falsetto-voiced man wheedled. "They say he killed fifteen- fifteen of the Shinsengumi by himself on that bridge a year ago. One man even begged for his life, because of his son, and they say he put a blade through his throat. Sasuga hitokiri. Talk about living up to the name of 'manslayer'."
Yuki felt ill. The blood left her face as though fleeing from the impending truth, leaving her white and nauseous as they continued:
"And that teahouse by the stream-"
"That's enough," Yamagata growled angrily, eyes flashing. "The last thing he needs is more gossip being spread while he tries to scrape by here with us. You call them victims, but he basically allowed us to win this war single-handedly. I don't hear you complaining about the lives of the men you fought on the battlefield, Shizuoka. How many did he kill for you?" The man swallowed audibly as Yamagata lowered his voice.
"You keep your thoughts to yourself, or you'll be spending your days doing dishes next to Hitokiri Battousai. Do you understand?"
Yuki's mouth dropped open. Her hand fell limp from the doorframe.
The red hair. The bandage over his face.
Oh my God.
The woman remembered the cold darkness that had touched his eyes as she'd shown him around and it all fell into place. Not wanting to be seen, the swiftness with which he had moved...
The young man currently serving as house hand in their garden was the infamous hitokiri.
Battousai the Manslayer.
A piece of crockery was knocked from the shelf to her left as she staggered backward, trying to remain upright. The voices stopped. Shimatta! Damn it! She knew the men had heard; the muffled sound of tabi-clad feet on the floorboards was fast approaching her. Her heart went up and practically out her throat in her panic. Would they kill her now that she knew? Would they make her mute to keep his secret? Would they exile her and demand her resignation? None of the possibilities that sprang to mind seemed palatable.
What she didn't expect was Yamagata's face poking through the noren, eyes full of concern and apology as he looked around the small shelf-ridden room.
"Matsumoto-san, are you all right?"
She fought for a brief semblance of composure. "I- yes, I-"
"You heard, didn't you," he stated with a sigh. His voice was more apologetic than full of blame, as she'd imagined it would be. "I had hoped I could brief you tonight, after you'd had your first impressions of him. May we speak after dinner?"
Yuki sat and stared, trying to piece together the idea that she might not be strung up like a scarecrow in the yard after all.
"Uh... Why yes. Of course. After dinner."
"Good," Yamagata sighed. "And, please don't mention this to anyone else. At least until after we have our meeting? There are... a few details you should know if you are going to work with Himura."
"...Uh. Yes...?"
"Thank you, Matsumoto-san. Oh, and I'll be looking forward to that niku-jaga of yours. You always get the sauce just right." He winked at her, an odd motion that made his whole face twitch comically. "Jaa, until then."
Yuki sat staring at the little bleached white fish swimming in circles on the dark noren curtains where Yamagata's face had been, trying to convince her pulse to head back down to a normal, healthy level. The fish stared stupidly back at her, waving back and forth a little in the leftover motion of the officer's departure. She inhaled deeply and blew a portion of the stress out on her breath, counting the seconds.
Only one full day with this Battousai, and I've already had half my remaining years scared out of me... I had better ask for a raise in pay.
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Scrub. Soak. Grind. Polish. Scrub. Soak. Grind. Polish.
They were all mindless actions, but just as skilled as if he'd had all of his full attention on them. The shine returned to the blades almost as if by magic, half of the kitchen stock finished in under a half hour. Himura's Shishou, his master, had taught him far too well how to care for a sword. Knives that were tools for chopping and skinning weren't much different.
The sleeves of his gi tied securely with a lengthy strip of cloth, Himura had taken over his list of duties with much more ease than he'd expected of himself. There were only a few moments when he'd faltered, remembering a time when he'd cut wood or pulled weeds in a place far away from the kitchen gardens in which he now knelt, with a pomegranate tree standing outside and sun blazing down on the roof of the farm house. It was just a small pause, no harm done. But he did wish that he hadn't stopped. He had lost a full two minutes of cooking time for the servants attending to dinner preparations.
The boy continued sharpening a single carving knife with swift, deft strokes.
Too slow... You can do better.
The perfection expected of him by his master was only surpassed by Himura's expectations of himself. After all, it wasn't the level of skill or accomplishment in others' eyes that mattered. It was the raising of one's own levels according to their ability. Wasn't it? That line of thought wound round and round his head until it traced the shape of a small redheaded child, beating a stick against a thick-trunked tree deep into the night, polishing piles of blades until sun-up and carrying heavy jugs of clay and sake miles back up the mountain to his teacher.
At the time, he'd thought the work meaningless and deliberately difficult, and he'd resented it, but later he'd learned that this carefully planned hardship was so that his capability and strength were built up without his knowledge. That was Shishou's way, he knew: to care without ever letting him know it directly. He still felt badly about the way things had ended between them, but he'd had to help, he'd had to be near other people...
People. People who hated, people who killed, people who murdered women and children and didn't think anything of it but the gold jingling in their pockets.
People who robbed others of those they loved.
"Agh!"
With a start, Himura realised he'd brought the polishing cloth too far down onto the blade and sliced his hand from the base knuckle of his index finger to the heel of his palm. He looked at it in surprise. It had been a while since he'd cut himself out of carelessness.
A long while.
He lifted a hand to the bandage on his face, automatically, unwittingly: a reflex a year or so in the making, covering his cheek.
This was just proof of what he'd known all along. Without other people to occupy his mind or his efforts, he would not last long in this place, nor perhaps in this world. Who now would be the saya sheath to stop his own mind from turning its cold, sharp steel onto himself again? With a sharp pang of emptiness, he wished Hayashii was there. The older man always seemed to help his mood and his misgivings, and the memories were less like vivid tortures and more like simple facts when he was around...
'Anata, you're bleeding again...'
Himura started a second time when a clopping sound came from the kitchen door.
Someone was tapping a pair of zori sandals onto his or her feet, parting the noren to enter the small garden as the last of the sun faded behind bamboo walls. The light was hinting at soft purples and blues now; how much time had gone by since he'd started polishing? He saw Yuki-san stumble out into the clearing of the courtyard as if tipsy, or perhaps shellshocked, and stepped toward his newly alotted cleaning area.
The moment she cleared the bushes and his face lifted toward her, she went deathly still.
It was only then that Himura realized the hand that had touched the bandage was the one he'd flayed open, leaving a stark bloody line across his face in an outward copy of what lay beneath it. All that was missing was Tomoe's line, and it would have been pointless to wear the patch at all. To add to the image, crouched next to a long mat covered in various blades, he still bore the giant carving knife in his uninjured hand, and a thin line of black-red blood trimmed its edge.
More than that, he could see from her eyes that she knew. She knew exactly what he was.
His heart lurched in his chest, and he dropped the knife, letting it fall to the tatami as useless as he felt right at that moment. It was over. They'd have to leave again. Just like every other town after the eventual two or three months. Hayashii would once again be uprooted because of him, and they'd be without a home or a life.
He fought back the lump gathering more and more mass in his throat.
I knew that it was pointless to try.
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Yuki had figured she'd make the best of the hour or so left before her meeting with Yamagata and confront the boy face to face about his former title. Maybe she could at least try to understand the young manslayer's- man's, she corrected herself- past deeds, and see if he would become a problem in the near future.
After all, he did save you from a boiling cauldron of death. And he got embarrassed to boot! She rolled her eyes lightly. Might as well talk to the poor... kid. That's right, he's just a kid! What else can I do? Ask when he's going to go insane and start a wild killing spree?
Stifling the leftover shake in her fingertips with a subtle flick of her wrist, she managed to put on her zori before heading out into the courtyard, where the girls had said they'd glimpsed the new help. A glimmer of red hair behind the lush hydrangea bushes told her where he was, and one more step put the figure directly into her line of sight.
He turned, and she found herself face to face with absolute horror.
Oh God, he's already killed someone!
At first she thought her imagination had run away with her, that she was just projecting the image of her fears onto the red-haired man as she expected to see him: the legendary assassin. But then she realized both the knife and the blood were real, as well as the scar, and she fought the urge to shriek and rush back into the house. Leftover adrenaline from her encounter with Yamagata did nothing to quell said urge; she was moments from throwing her hands in the air and screaming bloody murder.
It was only the look on the boy's face that stopped her.
As the initial rush wore off a bit, she saw that the young man had taken all the kitchen cutlery out on a woven rush mat to be cleaned and sharpened, and he had managed to get almost all the way through in less than a few hours. On the floor was a polishing cloth to clean the knives and the horrifically large blade he held in the other was a carving knife used for slabs of meat and vegetables.
As for the scar, the line on his face seemed to be a stain from his hand. There was a rather large cut beginning to trickle down his wrist from his palm, apparently sliced open with the knife he was attempting to polish. When he looked at her expression, his eyes filled with a knowing despair, and he actually dropped the carving knife onto the ground, as if his hands had lost the will to grasp anything any longer. His skin grew pale and the shine in his eyes was more than merely the whim of twilight sparkling there.
He looked as if she'd broken him.
The young man looked down at his bloodied hand and back up at her, desperately trying to think of something to say, standing quckly and looking around for something to cover his hand. He went from a demonic entity to a lost child in less than a moment. His voice shook like leaves in a rainstorm:
"I- I'm sorry, I- I was just... just cleaning and I..." The boy had begun to back away from her like one would an approaching tiger. "I'm sorry..."
In an instant the woman saw how the last few months had been for this soldier with painfully young and vulnerable eyes. He spent every moment trying to hide himself, fearing more than anything that the very essence of who he was would see him thrown out on the street, attacked by angry villagers, condemned by people he'd never even met, and frightened by the thought of being discovered at every turn- this time perhaps being rejected by those he'd helped in the past.
This was no cold and merciless killer. This was no demon who laughed with pleasure at others' fear as he slaughtered them. This was a frightened, grief-stricken boy, one who'd been without a home for far too long.
The redhead's face fell further, and his head dropped to allow his bangs to cover his eyes as he turned away from her, clutching the wrist of his sliced hand with white fingers. Yuki realized she hadn't moved since she'd seen him holding the knife, and he'd assumed the worst. His voice was deceptively steady as he knelt to busy himself with gathering the clean cutlery, rolling it up to carry inside:
"I'm sorry I stained the tatami. I'll clean it up in a moment-"
The caretaker forced herself to act. She stepped forward until she'd reached him and took his injured hand between both of hers, unhurriedly reaching to apply her handkerchief to the cut.
That instantly broke any hint of the shell of polite indifference he'd tried to put up: the boy flinched away as she touched him, and the woman saw that he was almost trying to keep her from coming in contact with the red stain on his palm. His eyes stayed on her, alarmed and panicked, as if at any moment she would come at him with her fists. Yuki was astonished and fascinated: he seemed just as afraid of her as she had been of him a mere minute ago.
As if I'd be any match for him... He's afraid for me?
In that moment, Yuki felt her heart break, and she regained her resolve. She moved the extra few inches of space between the, and covered the dark red line with clean white cotton cloth, wrapping it gently and trying to keep from hurting him further as she stopped the bleeding.
She met his eyes steadily. "You do good work. When it's not on yourself."
The boy blinked at her. She smiled at him, and he practically collapsed. Himura's head bowed further, and a single tear slipped from his closed eyes. A gasp came from deep in his throat and it took a full minute before he was able to speak. All of the relief in the world graced his quiet reply.
"...Thank you..."
Deep red hair covered most of his face in the violet darkness, and he struggled to breathe as his body shivered with emotion, trying not to break down further from the woman's act of kindness: so small, yet so much more than he had been shown for such a long time.
She supported him as they slowly made their way indoors, Himura clutching his hand and Yuki holding his shoulders to hold him steady.
Yuki told herself he'd get first bowl when they served the niku-jaga that night.
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Hayashii was so tired he could barely move. All the jobs he'd found for someone his size out in the boiling streets of Kyoto were construction jobs. A bustling city needed new and bigger buildings for people to bustle in, and everyone was trying to either rebuild destroyed housings or build their places up bigger and nicer for the extra business.
The ex-captain mopped his brow with a napkin, sighing as a chill breeze from the night air came rushing in the window, enveloping his soggy skin in a cape of cool relaxation. Kenshin had been missing when he came back, but then dinner had just begun, and he knew not to expect the boy back until the night's cleaning had been tended to. Hayashii had taken those jobs enough times to know one could never take late nights personally.
So he'd asked a passing maid for a drink to settle down with, listening to the quiet plinking of a shamisen drifting in the sliding balcony door and watched the dim glow of red and yellow paper lamps hanging in rows down in rafters below. A second story room always allowed for good people watching, so the aging man pulled a cushy pillow toward the edge of their tatami floor and leaned toward the night, his tray standing dutifully at attention beside him.
Behind him, Himura's katana lay upright in the corner against the wall.
I hope it went well for him today... Been a while since he's done well in cities like these.
The sake he'd ordered had almost cooled enough to pour, and he traced the small saucer cup in a perfect circle around its rim, absently listening to the frequency of the friction between his fingertip and the dark porcelain. His wife had hated it when he'd done that.
Fresh sweat glistened on his upper lip, and he dabbed at it again, tossing the napkin over his shoulder when he realized the moisture had nothing to do with heat. Memories were dangerous. At least he'd gotten to the point where he didn't sweat blood anymore, but it had taken a good few turns of the seasons to calm him down enough to where a bar brawl wasn't needed to forget the pain. As a captain, he was respected. He was feared. He had no one to question him, or make him care, and all he had to do was whatever he was told.
Until Himura came along...
That boy was both a healing balm and an acid over his brain. One moment he'd be tending Himura's wounds and the next he was back a decade past, faced with other children beneath his hands, ones that did not respond when he tried to stop their bleeding, tried to wake them...
Hayashii took the too-hot sake tumbler and downed it in one long swallow, ignoring his scorched throat. Damn.
He'd known that it would be hard without his wife and children, that one day it would sink in that he'd never be going home to them again after months on the battlefield. No more bedtime stories, no more first words or first steps, no little empty rice bowls on the table beside his own. No joyous noise from outside as they played. No sweet, soft skin as the cool flesh of Mika's hands played with the stubble on his chin or the length of his greying hair.
No family.
A cry rose from a small group of people watching a traveling performer down the road. Tinny applause and appreciative cooing drizzled in, muffled by the flute that had taken the shamisen's place. Hayashii watched in a manner quite becoming of a stone statue, letting it wash up and through him without any indication of being touched by it. His sake was gone and his spirits seemed to have been swallowed up with it.
He'd known it would be hard. He just wished he didn't miss them so damned much.
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(1) Nikujaga is a type of stewed veggies, potatoes and beef dish with sweet sauce: VERY tasty. (My host dad always said, "If you don't learn to make good niku-jaga, you'll NEVER get married! XD)
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Yyyeah... Remember that whole pregnancy thing? My baby girl's a year old now. And already done three cosplays! A pyrate child, Koenma and Ponyo! Ahem.
SORRY! XD SO much in the way! But yes, the urge hit me yesterday and I wrote as much as I could without stopping. You guys deserve that much! So never forget- we've learned that even a 24 year old can still continue FanFiction! If only for a bit... LOL.
Lemme know if you have any ideas on this, and if you want to listen to what I listened to while writing this, the link is: http:/www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=zYoHBH1UOTE&feature=autoplay&list=PL48281C39A0BE4BA1&index=1&playnext=12 . Just replace the (dot) with a period. Enjoy, guys!
LUFFS! Emiri
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