Summary: 50 stories about Kenshin and Kaoru, sometimes meandering to include other members of the Ruroken cast. Mix of canon and AU one shots. Some crack.

Disclaimer: Anything you can recognize here belongs to Watsuki Nobuhiro.

Characters: Battousai

Rating: T

Not Afraid

He wasn't scared.

It was not fear that he felt. Because he had known fear, lived it, felt it slither through his veins as he watched the disembodied arm of a man hold a sword high above Akane's head and bring it down. The drops of blood hit his skull like pellets of clay. Akane….her eyes had grown wide, so wide that the whites of her eyes seemed to swallow her irises, that is to say, that's what it had looked like. Later, he had realized that her eyes had simply rolled up into her head, leaving nothing for him to stare at but the pristine white of her deathly gaze.

Sakura had been next. She was holding him tight, whispering soft words of courage, telling him not to be sad, telling him to live and then suddenly, she stood, her arms hung at her side, and when he looked up, a katana was stuck through her neck, shielding him from seeing what death must have looked like in her eyes.

By the time they killed Kasumi, his fear had died away. The sword he had pulled out from under one of the dozens of bodies in that field had felt cold and strange in his tiny hands but fear had fled his mind. He was not afraid to die. He was not afraid of being hurt.

X

Those men had to be stopped. Because if they were not….then tears and blood would flow as one again. And that is why he was not afraid. He was not an angel of death, as his comrades so easily called him. An angel would not feel a gnawing pain, a hole inside his chest each time a stroke of his katana extinguished the life force of another human being. He accepted that pain, lived with it, and followed his orders. It was not for him to question who did what. All he knew was that he had a target, and the target had to be killed. The pain, the death and the centuries of suffering would be forgotten in the dawn of a new world.

He stepped forward. The man froze. As he crumbled, the red stain on his chest grew larger and larger. Iizuka knelt beside him and confirmed the death with a sly nod of the head. He turned and walked back to headquarters, refusing to fall into step with anybody else.

It was necessary. He knew that. Nobody else could do it. He knew this as well. Then why, why did he choose to remember how Akane had looked that night, the horror seeping into her face as she heard the telltale hiss of steel piercing the air.

A/N

This is still canon but I've wavered a bit from the timeline. Please Comment.