A/N: Sorry it took so long to update, but I had a few things going on at home that really sucked up my time. Plus, I had some major revisions that had to be made to one of my fics on the AFF before my readers over there ate me alive. Anyway, here is my latest offering for you all to enjoy, and I do sincerely hope you enjoy. As always, God Bless. Tsuki-san
Beta-reader note: I'm so sorry it's taking even longer! Somehow by the time the text got to me, my stupid wordpad screwed up the format or something so I had to do it all over again manually. -sigh- So here it is, rather late. As usual, any mistake grammatically is entirely mine, so please let me know if I've made any errors! Nigihayami Haruko
Chapter Seven
A Vision of Hell
The enormous blue pools of Kaoru's eye's suddenly blew wide open into massive round balls of terrified surprised and pain as the malevolent spirit passed through her flesh and into her soul. Kenshin watched in horrified helplessness as she was viciously thrown back, her thin arms flailing ineffectually at her sides as she tried to reach for some sort of support to stop her from falling, but there was nothing to hold onto causing Kaoru to drop like a stone landing with a 'THUD'.
"Ooooff," The air left her lungs with a rush, but before a single logical thought could register in her ice-cold brain, a wave of nausea and terrific pain lanced through Kaoru's vitals wrenching a strangled cry from her as she jerked into a fetal ball and began to convulse wildly on the floor. This finally spurred Kenshin from the place he had been standing frozen with fear and disbelief, and he quickly flew to her side kneeling next to her with the back of his hand pressed to his mouth as the bile of terror rose in the back of his throat. Swallowing hard against the fear, he stared in horrified confusion at Kaoru's jerking body even as the cold analytical logic of his keen intelligence instinctively began to try and figure a way out of this nightmare before it was too late for her.
"What do I do?" He cried over her convulsing and shuddering form. "Oh my God! What do I do!?" In all his life he had never felt this helpless nor this frightened before. Not even that night, when he was in the ally with all those Cop's yanking his body all over the place and snarling spit in his face, had he been this afraid. At least that night he had been in control of himself. Even if he had not been in control of that situation, he had retained his own self control, but this was different. This was someone else . . . and this was not just ANY situation.
"Kaoru?" He reached out and grabbed a hold of her and tried to pull her into his arms, but her body was jerking so violently that it was impossible. Kenshin began to feel the first true sensation of panic gripping his heart. "GOD DAMN YOU, DANIEL MARCH!!" His fists were clenched tightly as they rested on his thighs, and his head was thrown backward as he yelled out into the darkness of the tower in furious frustration. "I TOLD YOU, YOU CAN'T HAVE HER . . . , CAN YOU HEAR ME, YOU FUCKING MANIAC?? YOU. CANNOT. HAVE. HER."
There was a long deafening pause of silence that followed Kenshin's outburst, and then a great moaning and creaking sound could be heard coming from somewhere high above his head making all the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand up in primitive fear and awareness. It slithered and slipped along the wrought iron railing, echoing down the circular stairs like an old rusty gate hinge swinging in the cold ocean breeze. Soon, it was followed by the unmistakable sound of the upper door to the Lamp room being slowly pushed open as it scrapped along the cold stones until it banged firmly against the solid granite wall. As all of these unexplainable sound drifted down the tower to his terrified ears, Kenshin raised his frightened amber-gold eyes to peer into the darkness above him trying to discover what was happening. To his consternation, his teeth began to chatter, and it had nothing to do with the cold. Carefully, as he turned an ear to listen more intently to the now silent tower, he realized the tower was not silent at all. Kenshin could hear something coming.
A long scrape, a pause, a sliding drag. A long scrape, a pause, a sliding drag. It was coming out of the Lamp room and, whatever 'It' was, It was starting to come down the circular stairway.
A creaking step, a solid 'thump', a pause, and then a sliding drag. It had successfully navigated the first step. A creaking step, a solid 'thump,' a pause, and another sliding drag. The second step was breached and 'It' moved on to the third and the forth and the fifth step. Soon the monotonous litanies of the repetitious sounds were really getting to Kenshin as the moments passed by, and he cast a fearful gaze at the shuddering form of Kaoru before slowly rising to his feet. He knew he was the only thing that stood between her and 'whatever' was coming down the stairway, and he was going to have to find a way to keep anything else from happening to her. Slowly he turned toward the stairs and tried to prepare himself to face whatever was coming down to them. He could only imagine that it must be something horrible and even unspeakable . . . there was only one thing left up there was . . . Cassandra, or what was left of her. "Dear God," He whispered in a tight voice as his body began to tremble, "Please help me . . ." Kenshin tried to remember the chi breathing exercises he had studied in his karate classes for the last three years, and tried using them to calm himself. He needed a clear head if he was going to get them out of this thing in one piece, and this was the only way he could think of to clear his mind and maintain his self control.
As he concentrated on his breathing trying to clear his mind of all negative thoughts and energy, the muted sounds of the scraping and dragging splintered into his mind and forced his amber eyes to slam open against his will. At that moment Kenshin beheld the creature that was responsible for all the odd sounding noises and the scream of primitive terror he desperately tried to suppress beneath his training tore its way free from the core of his soul as he stumbled backwards falling to the floor. His mind and his heart cried out in denial that what his eyes saw could not be real, and a frantic hand rubbed furiously at his shocked eyes. But when he removed the hand, the horror he could not believe existed still remained standing where it had stopped and was now looking at him with its one clouded blue eye.
"Nooo, oh God, nooo." Kenshin shook his head in horror and disbelief but could not look away from the maimed and mangled specter that had once been the beautiful Cassandra. Most of her glorious long black hair was gone, rotted away in the abrasive salty water of the Cove that was her grave. The rotted flesh that covered her corpse hung in sagging flaps and pieces that revealed beneath them, as she moved, the shriveled muscles and tendons as well as the chalky gray of naked bones. Her right leg hung uselessly at her side having been completely severed from her body except for the attachments of a few ligaments and one piece of flesh, where once a shapely buttock had been. The jagged edges of numerous broken ribs protruded through the rotted linen of her cotton shift, and her left arm was missing entirely.
This pitiful specter held onto the wrought iron railing by crossing her body with her right hand, and balanced the weight of her body on her intact left leg as she moved down the stairs. Finally Kenshin could finally understand how the strange noises he had heard were made. The sliding drag was her pulling her armless left shoulder along the stone wall, while the dead thump was the severed leg dropping from one stair to the next. The pause in between must be caused from her moving her hand down the railing for a new grip to pull herself farther along.
But despite the horror of that rotted and broken corpse that stood openly displayed before him, it all paled beneath the impact of the ruin of what had once been a beautiful face - Kaoru's face.
The entire left side of her face was gone, the skin and most of the musculature having been stripped away as she had plummeted into the razor sharp rocks at the base of the island. Her nose, her eye, her ear, and a large part of her jawbone had simply been sheared away by the force of her impact. It was also most likely the same collision that had deprived her of her arm, and perhaps severed the opposite leg. It was a wonder to him that her skull had managed to remain intact at all; although, there was a great depression over the place where her left eye should have been.
Kenshin was frozen with horror of what he was seeing and his heart was beating so fast he thought it was going to burst out of his throat to run free like a wild thing gone mad. His lungs felt as if they were made of lead inside of his chest, and he could not seem to force himself to draw even one single breath of air. He could not move. He could not look away. He could not even think.
"Hhhhheeelllpp . . . mmmeeee . . . Edddmmoonnd . . . " The voice sounded like dried leaves being crushed in a vicious fist, but it was enough to finally break the spell of terror that surrounded the young redheaded teen. Loud gasping sounds were heard as he breathed in a rapid succession of deep breaths and then started to cough as he caught more dust than air. Frantically blinking his eyes, Kenshin stared for a short horrified moment at the entreating form of the dead rotted corpse standing on the stairs above him, and then he rolled to his feet and rushed back to Kaoru's side. He found she was no longer convulsing, nor was she curled into such a tight ball of pain either, but her eyes were wide open and staring blankly into space as if she saw nothing around her.
"Kaoru, Honey?" He gently shook her by the shoulder but got no response from his efforts so he called her name in a louder and firmer voice. "Kaoru? Kaoru!?" Kenshin felt the fingers of both desperation and panic curling around his heart again as he searched his mind for something he could do to help her. "What can I do?" He breathed. "What can I . . . " Suddenly his head whipped up as an idea occurred to him. It was a bizarre, but considering everything else that had happened tonight, what the hell ... it just might work.
Looking over his shoulder, Kenshin made sure the specter had not moved, and then he leaned over and gathered into his arms the limp body of the girl who had come to mean so much to him in such a remarkably short period of time. As he picked her up, he turned to face the unmoving apparition of Cassandra O'Massy, taking a deep breath, he took two long strides forward until he stood almost in the direct center of the tower, and then he dropped Kaoru's feet to the floor while he continued to hold her up with one arm around her middle.
"Help me, God ..." He muttered under his breath as he locked gazes with the corpse and slowly reached in front of Kaoru and cupped her chin in his free hand carefully tilting her face upwards until the angle was just right, and then, with a prayer in his heart, Kenshin put his bizarre idea into motion.
"Look, Daniel ... " He spoke softly into Kaoru's small shell-like ear. "Look ... just there ... can you see her?" The body in his arms jerked once ... very violently. Kenshin continued. "Do you see HER, Daniel? Do you see THAT THING up there?" He forced Koaru's chin up higher making her eyes look upon the hideous corpse that leaned against the granite wall above them. Again the body jerked violently in Kenshin's arms, but now the head began to try and resist the hold he had on its chin, but he held on firmly. "Look at it, you Bastard ..." He hissed. "LOOK AT IT!" And as he took one more step forward, the body in his arms began to flail and tried to pull away from the horror that stood before it. "THAT IS YOUR WIFE! THAT IS YOUR CASSANDRA!"
"Noooooooooooo ... " Kaoru's voice rose high and thin as the frantic spirit of Daniel March struggled to pull away from the hellish vision before 'their' eyes.
"Yesss." Kenshin's voice took on the cruel taint most who knew him would have found quite usual had they been there to hear it. "Look at her, you fucking asshole. Look at what YOU did to her ... YOU killed her ... SHE IS DEAD and YOU DID IT!"
"NOOOOO ... " Kaoru's body was fighting with an incredible amount of strength and it was taking almost everything Kenshin had to keep her subdued and maintain the visual contact needed between Daniel March's ghost and Cassandra's rotting specter.
"LOOOOOK!" He screamed and lunged forward another step bringing them within only a few feet of the horror on the stairs. "LOOOK AT HER!"
"Aaaayyyyyyyahhhh!!" The gut-wrenching scream of grief and horror rose and split the cold frosty air like a great sword cutting through the most frail tissue leaving behind only the blood and the death, and suddenly Kaoru's body went completely limp in Kenshin's arms.
"K-Kaoru?" He stumbled over her name as he lowered her to the floor and fearfully searched her still features. "Kaoru? Oh God, no ... Kaoru!" He cried out and lifted her against his chest in grief. "Please do not do this to me ... Please ..."
"Damn ... you ... Fetlock. Damn you to hell everlastin'." Kenshin looked up in shocked surprise at the sound of another voice speaking in the strained silence besides his, and looked into the exhausted fading face of Daniel March. "I told you I would not let you take 'er from me again, you filthy Limey-Bastard . . . I told you . . . "
"Daniel ..." Kenshin stared into the pained and grief-stricken face of the long dead Irishman where he lay on his stomach a few short feet away from him and the now unconscious Kaoru, and felt a small sense of pity for him. "I did not take her from you, Daniel ... you killed her. Don't you remember?" His voice was beginning to take on an almost pleading sound as he tried to get through to the obsessed spirit. "Why can't you remember, Daniel? You have to remember ... You killed Cassandra ... She is dead. You saw her yourself."
"Fuck you, Fetlock. I might have thrown 'er over the edge, but it was your 'ands that kilt her. It was you that kilt me Princess, Eddy, you bloody Limey's son-of-a-whore. You kilt 'er when youtook her away from me."
"Daniel. I'm not Fet . . . "
"Shut the fuck up you bleedin' Rube." The ghost rolled over onto his side and sat part of the way up. "I'll get 'er back." He raised his hand and pointed a stern finger at Kenshin as his lips pealed back into a fiendish sneer. "Mark me words, Edmond Fetlock, I'll get her back and then it will be your soul that's goin' to rot in 'ell, not mine." And then the Ghost of Daniel March faded into the black of the tower and was gone.
"Noooo. Wait!" Kenshin reached out his hand toward the place where the dead man had lain, but he was no longer there. "No, please no." Looking up to where Cassandra's specter had stood, Kenshin found that she, too, had gone. He and Kaoru were alone ... again, but he was no closer to knowing what to do than he had been before. He had not saved them from anything.
"Kaoru," He gently touched her pale cheek with tender fingers, and then stood up with her in his arms. "It is way past time we got the hell out of here, Honey." His voice was low and hard as flint as he turned and walked out of the doorway and back into the chilled night air and the freedom they should have found a long time before now.
It was a long walk back to the bluff, and when they got there, everyone was freaking out.
"What the hell happened up there??" Sano's voice and face were filled with terrified worry as he looked into Kenshin's stony face. "Kenshin?"
"What happened to my sister? What's wrong with Kaoru??" Yahiko was at Kenshin's side
pulling on his sleeve in frightened anxiety. "Mr. Himura? Is Kaoru gonna be Ok? Mr. Himura??"
"Himura?" Misao came to stand next to him, and, touching his arm softly, was able to get him to look at her. The emotions and unspoken thoughts reflected in his glittering golden eyes made her catch her breath. "Oh no . . . " She whispered as she tightened her grip slightly. "We gotta gets her back home fast, don't we?" He nodded sharply, and moved past her walking steadily back down the luff toward the rickety bridge. Even Ruakii seemed worried as he collected Yahiko, Quii, and Tomoe and started them back along the edge of the bluff behind Kenshin's retreating form. Aoshi pulled up next to a stunned and worried Misao and gently took her hand in his, and tugging gently on it, pulled her along behind him. Sano ran up beside the silently walking couple and whispered something to Aoshi who nodded his head in agreement, and then, leaving a gapping Megumi behind with them, Sano headed down the bluff after Kenshin.
"Hey, hang on. You can't go across the bridge alone with her like that. Wait up, will ya?" Sano quickly loped up beside Kenshin and fell into step beside him. Worry and curiosity welled up inside of him, but he did not dare say a word. Not after looking at the expression on Kenshin's face when he had come back from the Lighthouse carrying an unconscious Kaoru. Besides, his eyes were that creepy yellow-gold color again, and Sano did not want to mess with him while he was in THAT kind of a mood. He was remembering all to well what had happened the last time Kenshin's eyes had turned that color. Right now all he was really worried about was the Kamiya girl. She and her brat brother were the Wards of Dr. And Mrs. Gensai and if anything serious had happened to her out there tonight ... well, the shit was really going to hit the fan.
As he looked down at her pale still features, Sano shivered, remembering what had been going on while Kenshin and the girl were gone inside the Lighthouse. The rest of the group had been standing out on the bluff in helpless shock and growing fear as they listened to all of the screaming and arguing that had started going on over there ... But not only that, they had been listening to all of the DIFFERENT voices that had been involved with the screaming and arguing. There were far more than just two people responsible for all of that noise, and that fact had gotten them all really spooked, but when Kenshin had showed up with an unconscious Kaoru in his arms, everything became all too real and it was not a game anymore. Suddenly it really did not matter who won the bet or who lost. They all just wanted to get the hell out of there and get Kaoru home so they could make sure she was all right.
October 29, 2001
Sunday, 03:17 A.M.
Girl's Dormitory, Ive Payne High School
As he continued to tenderly cradle the unconscious body of Kaoru Kamiya in his arms, Kenshin quietly followed Misao through the back door of the girl's dormitory. This was one thing he had never thought he would be doing while enrolled at Ive Payne, and that was sneaking into the girl's dorm without coming to 'see' someone. Of course, at this point in time, that was the farthest thing from his mind. Right now all he wanted to do was get Kaoru to her room, lay her down, and try to see if he could her to wake up. The fact that she was still unconscious was causing him a great deal of worry and anxiety. It was becoming tantamount that he be positively certain she was physically alright and that she was lucid and coherent in her mind. He would never be able to sleep until he knew what had happened to her mind after it had been invaded by the spirit of Daniel March, and Kenshin also knew that he could never forgive himself if she had been hurt in any way. After all, had he not been the one to promise her that everything would be all right? Had he not said, that all she had to do was stay close to him and he would not let anything bad happen to her? Guilt and self recrimination were bouncing around in his head and gnawing at his soul until he almost felt as if he could drop to his knees and cry, but, of course, he would never let that happen. He would never give into that kind of emotion ... especially with Misao right here. Yet, he could not shake the worry nor the anxiety that chewed on his conscience.
To tell the truth, Kenshin could not remember when he had ever felt so worried about anyone ... except maybe Soujiro ... or Cleo. He worried about Cleo all of the time. He worried about her learning to talk, learning to read, learning to write, learning how to draw things the right way. He worried about her having nightmares while he was not there to chase the monsters away, and he worried about her growing up with out ever really knowing who he was. That was the one thing Kenshin worried about the most. He was afraid Cleo would never really know who he was, and that when he finally got out of this hell-hole, she probably would not want too. Thanks to his parents.
"In here." Misao's hissing whisper caught Kenshin's attention back to the present and he silently ducked through the door she was holding open. As he stepped inside, she closed the door and flipped on the light.
"Geez ... Misao!" Kenshin gritted between his teeth as the brightness of the light pierced
through his head and tried to tear his eyes out of their sockets. "You could warn a guy, you know."
"Sorry," She apologized lamely and shrugged. "Didn't think about it."
"Fine," He glared at her with glittering amethyst jewels and then looked expectantly over at the neatly made bed and waited. With a flurry of flustered gestures Misao walked over to the bed and pulled the top comforter and sheets down, and then watched with surprised eyes as Kenshin ever so gently laid Kaoru's body upon the soft mattress. Then she watched as he carefully laid Kaoru's legs out straight and then adjusted her head into a comfortable position on the downy pillow. 'I'll be damned,' Misao thought in surprise. 'He does have a heart in there after all ... who woulda thought?'
"Kaoru?" Kenshin called the name softly as he sat down next to her and reached out too gently brush some stray strands of black hair from her pale face. "Kaoru? Honey ... can you hear me? Wake up, Baby ... It's me ... It's Kenshin. Can you wake up for me? Please?" Misao continued to listen with a new insight on this exceptionally complex young man as his voice took on an unusual tone of urgency and she began to realize that something very important as well as something very terrible must have happened between these two during their harrowing visit to the Lighthouse.
"Kaoru ... Please wake up, Honey ... You are really starting to scare the shit out of me." Kenshin touched her cool cheek with his fingertips and then leaned down and very gently brushed his lips across hers in a worried yet tender kiss. "Please ... wake up." As his head dropped, his face was buried inside the thickness of her hair where it had piled up around her neck. "I have to know you are Ok, Kaoru. I have to know that He did not hurt you ... Please, Baby. You have to wake up." Kenshin's voice took on a thick husky tone as he burrowed deeper into the curve of her throat and he placed his arms tenderly on the mattress on either side of her shoulders so his hands could hold her. "Wake up, Kaoru ... Wake up."
"Himura?" Misao laid a soft hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Kenshin? Hey, guy ... what happened to you guys up there tonight? What happened to 'her'?"
"You would not believe me if I told you, Misao." Was his muffled reply. "Nobody would ...
It's too ... unreal."
"Yes I would." She knelt down on the floor next to his legs and put a trusting hand on his thigh. "I would believe you ... Hell, after listening to all of that screaming and shit that was coming from that place, I think I would believe just about anything you said."
"You heard all of that?" He lifted his head and looked down at her with violet eyes filled with shock.
"Of course ... we all did. Good grief, it sounded like someone was getting murdered in there ... ummm ... you know what I mean." She screwed her lips up in an embarrassed pout as she realized the unfortunate pun that she had inadvertently made.
"Yes, I do know what you mean, and, Misao ..." Those same shocked violet eyes took on a deadly serious gleam as they bore into her blue-green ones. "Someone did get murdered up there ... and Kaoru and I saw it. We saw the whole god-awful damn thing."
"You ... You saw ...?" Misao's eyes grew into huge round balls of astonishment as she tried to assimilate what Kenshin had just told her. "What the hell are you talking about? What did you see?"
"We stood and watched as Daniel March murdered his Wife, Misao. We watched him pick her up and throw her over the edge of the catwalk ... we saw it as if it were happening to real people."
"You're shitting me, Himura." Her head shook in abject denial.
"No. I am not." He looked back at Kaoru's pale face in sadness, and then continued. "She looked just like Kaoru ... just exactly alike."
"What?"
"Cassandra ... Her face ... it was Kaoru's face. They were exactly the same." Kenshin reached out tracing the line of Kaoru's cheekbone and jawline, then the gentle slope of her nose. "It was ... uncanny ... the resemblance. It was like looking at identical twins."
"Himura ... you are talking ... crazy."
"I knew you would not believe me, didn't I say so, Misao?" His voice twisted into a sardonic sneer as he turned away from her completely.
"Well, yeah but this is ... it's just ... it's ..."
"It's what?" He snapped. "Do you think we were up there making all of that fucking noise by ourselves? Or maybe, maybe we just happen to run into a couple of transients that NOBODY else did, and THEY scared the shit out of us."
"Himura ... Quiet down, or you'll have old man Gensai in here breathing down our necks."
"Whatever," He snorted. "I don't give a shit about old man Gensai."
"Fine ... maybe you don't but I do. I could get expelled for having you in here. Geez."
"So sorry ... I will try to be more ... cooperative in the future, Miss Machimaki."
"God. I forgot what a sarcastic asshole you really were."
"Glad I could take the opportunity to remind you."
"Shut-up. I'm your friend, remember?"
"With friends like you ..."
"Hey, you big jerk. If you don't want me to be your friend, all you have to do is ..."
"Misao ..." Suddenly the frustrated war of words between the two irritated friends was abruptly brought to a close as Kaoru's tiny whisper floated up and ended it. "Don't call Kenshin 'a jerk'. Ok?"
"Kaoru??" Both Kenshin and Misao were leaning over the pale girl's face in show of deep
concern. Kenshin's hand was trembling as it gently cupped her cool cheek and tilted her face so he could look into her eyes. "Kaoru ..." The softest and most tender smile Misao had ever seen in her life crossed the fine features of the confusing boy next to her. "Are you Ok?" He asked her in a gentle concerned voice. "Are you hurt or anything, Honey?"
Kaoru drew a deep shaky sigh and blinked her eyes several times as she tried to focus on the handsome face looking so intently into hers. "Kenshin?" Her hand shakily lifted from her stomach and covered his where it cupped her face. She could feel the warmth of his palm as it conformed to her cheek and she turned her face into that warmth even as she let her fingers slid in between his.
"Yes." He let his thumb tenderly stroke the softness of her skin as he leaned forward and rubbed his nose against hers. "Are you Ok?" He asked again as he pulled back slightly and worriedly searched her semi-glassy eyes. "Are you hurt or anything?"
"I... I don't think so." Her other hand rose and cupped his face as she looked into his concerned violet eyes. "But I do have a terrible headache." A small laugh escaped his lips just before he turned them into the palm of her hand and pressed a tender kiss against it.
"I would think so." He said quietly, and then met her eyes again. "Do you remember anything that happened? Do you remember going to the Lighthouse or anything that we did inside?"
"I..." Her delicate brows knitted in confusion as she searched his face for clues and answers, and then the dawning light of memory filled her face and those beautiful sapphire diamonds filled with tears. "Oh... nooo." Both hands came to cover her face as everything came back to her in the rush of a single moment. "Kennsshiin..." She sobbed and reached for him wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and shoulders even as he gathered her up and held her close against his heart.
"It is all right now, Tanuki." He whispered into the thickness of her hair as he pulled her closer feeling her tremble with shock and horror. "It is all over, and everything is all right now... I promise. It is all right... Do not cry, Tanuki... Please do not cry." Kenshin rocked Kaoru back and forth crooning softly to her as if she were a small child in need of comfort after a bad dream. His hand gently stroked the long length of her glossy black hair over and over as he tenderly pressed soft kisses against her neck and nape as he murmured soft words of solace into her sensitive ear.
Misao was completely taken aback as she watched the couple interact with each other. This was not something she would have ever thought she would see coming from Kenshin Himura, the original 'Stone Cold Heart'. Quietly she backed away from the two of them and slipped out of the door closing it quietly behind her leaving them alone. As she walked down the darkened hallway towards her own room, Misao decided that given Kaoru's bizarre behavior once she finally woke up, Kenshin must have been telling the truth, but if he was, that meant... She stopped in the middle of the hallway as a chill raced up her spine.
The Lighthouse was really haunted.
"Oh Shit!"
Back inside Kaoru's room Kenshin continued to hold her close to him as she sobbed uncontrollably in the aftermath of shocked realization. Her mind was screaming with fear and denial while her soul was shriveling inward upon itself in an instinctive desperation of trying to hide from the reality it was refusing to face. Horrible images of smoke-thin ghosts, plunging bodies, and rotted corpses stumbled and collided with one another within the jumbled erratic kaleidoscope that was her mind, while the reality of what was truth and what was fantasy seemed to be blurring into one edgeless gray world.
Kaoru thought she was going insane, all she could do was hold onto Kenshin and pray that her mind was not splintering into crystal fragments the way it had before... before... before...
Suddenly deep within her mind an image began to take shape. An image she had not allowed herself to look at or see for a very long time. It started out very small, no bigger than a mite, but then it began to grow and grow until it spread far and wide filling the infinite spaces of her mindscape. Blurry wavering lines of brilliant red, yellow, and orange swept across the dark backdrop of the picture, and then there were the glaring painful flashes of pure white that hurt her eyes to look at. It was so hard to see anything because it was all so blurry and out of focus... It was always that way. She could never quite bring the whole picture into a clear sharp image. All of the edges remained liquid and bled into one another as she ran through the leaping reds and oranges, and suddenly she could smell smoke and feel the tremendous heat on her skin. Then the screaming came. It always came after the smoke and the heat, but she could never finish the end of the image-vision. She could never finish it...
"Mother... Daddy..." The sound of Kaoru's anguished whisper against his shoulder startled Kenshin. 'Mother? Daddy?' He thought. 'What do her parents have to do with this?' Tenderly he pulled her back away from him just far enough so that he could look into her ravaged face, and what he saw there made his heart stop and his breath freeze in his lungs. Her face was a distorted mask of grief and sorrow unlike any he had ever witnessed before, and the look in her eyes was a million miles away. Kaoru was no longer thinking about what had happened up at the Lighthouse. She was back on the front lawn of her house watching it burn with her parents inside, but there was no way for Kenshin to know that. All he knew was she was trapped somewhere inside of herself. Somewhere very painful.
"Kaoru?" He spoke her name gently and raised a hand to tenderly wipe some of the wetness off her face. "Where are you, Tanuki? What can you see?"
"My house..." She whispered in a faraway voice. "It is my house."
"What about your house? What happened at your house?"
"It burned up... The furnace exploded and it burned up."
"Oh Honey, I'm so sorry."
"They could not get out." Kenshin felt an uneasy shiver race up his back as she spoke those soft cryptic words. "They were stuck in the hallway and they could not get out."
"Who, Baby? Who was stuck?" Even as he asked the question, Kenshin knew the answer.
"Mother and Daddy. They burned to death in the fire. I... I watched it burn with them inside. I watched it burn."
"Kaoru." With a feeling of extreme sadness Kenshin pulled her back against him and cradled her head beneath his chin while he started rocking her again. "I am sorry, Honey. I did not know your parents died in a fire, and I did not know you were there to see it either. I am so damn sorry."
"It was my fault..." As she spoke those quiet meaningful words, Kenshin reared back in open mouthed wide-eyed shock.
"What did you say?" He asked in a disbelieving voice.
"It was my fault." She repeated as her body went limp with grief. "I was the one responsible for the fire. It was my fault the furnace exploded. It is my fault my parents are dead." Tears began to stream down her face as she raised empty dead pools of cobalt blue to look into Kenshin's stunned face. "I killed them."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
There, chew on that for a few days. My Father-in-law is in the hospital so things might be running a bit slow over the next little while, but hang in there. I'm working on it.
Next up will be the new chapter for Master of High Tower
And then the new one for Beloved of The White Flame. A couple of weeks give or take. God Bless, and see ya soon.
Please Review.
Tsuki-san
Beta-reader note: I'm so sorry it's taking even longer! Somehow by the time the text got to me, my stupid wordpad screwed up the format or something so I had to do it all over again manually. -sigh- So here it is, rather late. As usual, any mistake grammatically is entirely mine, so please let me know if I've made any errors! Nigihayami Haruko
Chapter Seven
A Vision of Hell
The enormous blue pools of Kaoru's eye's suddenly blew wide open into massive round balls of terrified surprised and pain as the malevolent spirit passed through her flesh and into her soul. Kenshin watched in horrified helplessness as she was viciously thrown back, her thin arms flailing ineffectually at her sides as she tried to reach for some sort of support to stop her from falling, but there was nothing to hold onto causing Kaoru to drop like a stone landing with a 'THUD'.
"Ooooff," The air left her lungs with a rush, but before a single logical thought could register in her ice-cold brain, a wave of nausea and terrific pain lanced through Kaoru's vitals wrenching a strangled cry from her as she jerked into a fetal ball and began to convulse wildly on the floor. This finally spurred Kenshin from the place he had been standing frozen with fear and disbelief, and he quickly flew to her side kneeling next to her with the back of his hand pressed to his mouth as the bile of terror rose in the back of his throat. Swallowing hard against the fear, he stared in horrified confusion at Kaoru's jerking body even as the cold analytical logic of his keen intelligence instinctively began to try and figure a way out of this nightmare before it was too late for her.
"What do I do?" He cried over her convulsing and shuddering form. "Oh my God! What do I do!?" In all his life he had never felt this helpless nor this frightened before. Not even that night, when he was in the ally with all those Cop's yanking his body all over the place and snarling spit in his face, had he been this afraid. At least that night he had been in control of himself. Even if he had not been in control of that situation, he had retained his own self control, but this was different. This was someone else . . . and this was not just ANY situation.
"Kaoru?" He reached out and grabbed a hold of her and tried to pull her into his arms, but her body was jerking so violently that it was impossible. Kenshin began to feel the first true sensation of panic gripping his heart. "GOD DAMN YOU, DANIEL MARCH!!" His fists were clenched tightly as they rested on his thighs, and his head was thrown backward as he yelled out into the darkness of the tower in furious frustration. "I TOLD YOU, YOU CAN'T HAVE HER . . . , CAN YOU HEAR ME, YOU FUCKING MANIAC?? YOU. CANNOT. HAVE. HER."
There was a long deafening pause of silence that followed Kenshin's outburst, and then a great moaning and creaking sound could be heard coming from somewhere high above his head making all the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand up in primitive fear and awareness. It slithered and slipped along the wrought iron railing, echoing down the circular stairs like an old rusty gate hinge swinging in the cold ocean breeze. Soon, it was followed by the unmistakable sound of the upper door to the Lamp room being slowly pushed open as it scrapped along the cold stones until it banged firmly against the solid granite wall. As all of these unexplainable sound drifted down the tower to his terrified ears, Kenshin raised his frightened amber-gold eyes to peer into the darkness above him trying to discover what was happening. To his consternation, his teeth began to chatter, and it had nothing to do with the cold. Carefully, as he turned an ear to listen more intently to the now silent tower, he realized the tower was not silent at all. Kenshin could hear something coming.
A long scrape, a pause, a sliding drag. A long scrape, a pause, a sliding drag. It was coming out of the Lamp room and, whatever 'It' was, It was starting to come down the circular stairway.
A creaking step, a solid 'thump', a pause, and then a sliding drag. It had successfully navigated the first step. A creaking step, a solid 'thump,' a pause, and another sliding drag. The second step was breached and 'It' moved on to the third and the forth and the fifth step. Soon the monotonous litanies of the repetitious sounds were really getting to Kenshin as the moments passed by, and he cast a fearful gaze at the shuddering form of Kaoru before slowly rising to his feet. He knew he was the only thing that stood between her and 'whatever' was coming down the stairway, and he was going to have to find a way to keep anything else from happening to her. Slowly he turned toward the stairs and tried to prepare himself to face whatever was coming down to them. He could only imagine that it must be something horrible and even unspeakable . . . there was only one thing left up there was . . . Cassandra, or what was left of her. "Dear God," He whispered in a tight voice as his body began to tremble, "Please help me . . ." Kenshin tried to remember the chi breathing exercises he had studied in his karate classes for the last three years, and tried using them to calm himself. He needed a clear head if he was going to get them out of this thing in one piece, and this was the only way he could think of to clear his mind and maintain his self control.
As he concentrated on his breathing trying to clear his mind of all negative thoughts and energy, the muted sounds of the scraping and dragging splintered into his mind and forced his amber eyes to slam open against his will. At that moment Kenshin beheld the creature that was responsible for all the odd sounding noises and the scream of primitive terror he desperately tried to suppress beneath his training tore its way free from the core of his soul as he stumbled backwards falling to the floor. His mind and his heart cried out in denial that what his eyes saw could not be real, and a frantic hand rubbed furiously at his shocked eyes. But when he removed the hand, the horror he could not believe existed still remained standing where it had stopped and was now looking at him with its one clouded blue eye.
"Nooo, oh God, nooo." Kenshin shook his head in horror and disbelief but could not look away from the maimed and mangled specter that had once been the beautiful Cassandra. Most of her glorious long black hair was gone, rotted away in the abrasive salty water of the Cove that was her grave. The rotted flesh that covered her corpse hung in sagging flaps and pieces that revealed beneath them, as she moved, the shriveled muscles and tendons as well as the chalky gray of naked bones. Her right leg hung uselessly at her side having been completely severed from her body except for the attachments of a few ligaments and one piece of flesh, where once a shapely buttock had been. The jagged edges of numerous broken ribs protruded through the rotted linen of her cotton shift, and her left arm was missing entirely.
This pitiful specter held onto the wrought iron railing by crossing her body with her right hand, and balanced the weight of her body on her intact left leg as she moved down the stairs. Finally Kenshin could finally understand how the strange noises he had heard were made. The sliding drag was her pulling her armless left shoulder along the stone wall, while the dead thump was the severed leg dropping from one stair to the next. The pause in between must be caused from her moving her hand down the railing for a new grip to pull herself farther along.
But despite the horror of that rotted and broken corpse that stood openly displayed before him, it all paled beneath the impact of the ruin of what had once been a beautiful face - Kaoru's face.
The entire left side of her face was gone, the skin and most of the musculature having been stripped away as she had plummeted into the razor sharp rocks at the base of the island. Her nose, her eye, her ear, and a large part of her jawbone had simply been sheared away by the force of her impact. It was also most likely the same collision that had deprived her of her arm, and perhaps severed the opposite leg. It was a wonder to him that her skull had managed to remain intact at all; although, there was a great depression over the place where her left eye should have been.
Kenshin was frozen with horror of what he was seeing and his heart was beating so fast he thought it was going to burst out of his throat to run free like a wild thing gone mad. His lungs felt as if they were made of lead inside of his chest, and he could not seem to force himself to draw even one single breath of air. He could not move. He could not look away. He could not even think.
"Hhhhheeelllpp . . . mmmeeee . . . Edddmmoonnd . . . " The voice sounded like dried leaves being crushed in a vicious fist, but it was enough to finally break the spell of terror that surrounded the young redheaded teen. Loud gasping sounds were heard as he breathed in a rapid succession of deep breaths and then started to cough as he caught more dust than air. Frantically blinking his eyes, Kenshin stared for a short horrified moment at the entreating form of the dead rotted corpse standing on the stairs above him, and then he rolled to his feet and rushed back to Kaoru's side. He found she was no longer convulsing, nor was she curled into such a tight ball of pain either, but her eyes were wide open and staring blankly into space as if she saw nothing around her.
"Kaoru, Honey?" He gently shook her by the shoulder but got no response from his efforts so he called her name in a louder and firmer voice. "Kaoru? Kaoru!?" Kenshin felt the fingers of both desperation and panic curling around his heart again as he searched his mind for something he could do to help her. "What can I do?" He breathed. "What can I . . . " Suddenly his head whipped up as an idea occurred to him. It was a bizarre, but considering everything else that had happened tonight, what the hell ... it just might work.
Looking over his shoulder, Kenshin made sure the specter had not moved, and then he leaned over and gathered into his arms the limp body of the girl who had come to mean so much to him in such a remarkably short period of time. As he picked her up, he turned to face the unmoving apparition of Cassandra O'Massy, taking a deep breath, he took two long strides forward until he stood almost in the direct center of the tower, and then he dropped Kaoru's feet to the floor while he continued to hold her up with one arm around her middle.
"Help me, God ..." He muttered under his breath as he locked gazes with the corpse and slowly reached in front of Kaoru and cupped her chin in his free hand carefully tilting her face upwards until the angle was just right, and then, with a prayer in his heart, Kenshin put his bizarre idea into motion.
"Look, Daniel ... " He spoke softly into Kaoru's small shell-like ear. "Look ... just there ... can you see her?" The body in his arms jerked once ... very violently. Kenshin continued. "Do you see HER, Daniel? Do you see THAT THING up there?" He forced Koaru's chin up higher making her eyes look upon the hideous corpse that leaned against the granite wall above them. Again the body jerked violently in Kenshin's arms, but now the head began to try and resist the hold he had on its chin, but he held on firmly. "Look at it, you Bastard ..." He hissed. "LOOK AT IT!" And as he took one more step forward, the body in his arms began to flail and tried to pull away from the horror that stood before it. "THAT IS YOUR WIFE! THAT IS YOUR CASSANDRA!"
"Noooooooooooo ... " Kaoru's voice rose high and thin as the frantic spirit of Daniel March struggled to pull away from the hellish vision before 'their' eyes.
"Yesss." Kenshin's voice took on the cruel taint most who knew him would have found quite usual had they been there to hear it. "Look at her, you fucking asshole. Look at what YOU did to her ... YOU killed her ... SHE IS DEAD and YOU DID IT!"
"NOOOOO ... " Kaoru's body was fighting with an incredible amount of strength and it was taking almost everything Kenshin had to keep her subdued and maintain the visual contact needed between Daniel March's ghost and Cassandra's rotting specter.
"LOOOOOK!" He screamed and lunged forward another step bringing them within only a few feet of the horror on the stairs. "LOOOK AT HER!"
"Aaaayyyyyyyahhhh!!" The gut-wrenching scream of grief and horror rose and split the cold frosty air like a great sword cutting through the most frail tissue leaving behind only the blood and the death, and suddenly Kaoru's body went completely limp in Kenshin's arms.
"K-Kaoru?" He stumbled over her name as he lowered her to the floor and fearfully searched her still features. "Kaoru? Oh God, no ... Kaoru!" He cried out and lifted her against his chest in grief. "Please do not do this to me ... Please ..."
"Damn ... you ... Fetlock. Damn you to hell everlastin'." Kenshin looked up in shocked surprise at the sound of another voice speaking in the strained silence besides his, and looked into the exhausted fading face of Daniel March. "I told you I would not let you take 'er from me again, you filthy Limey-Bastard . . . I told you . . . "
"Daniel ..." Kenshin stared into the pained and grief-stricken face of the long dead Irishman where he lay on his stomach a few short feet away from him and the now unconscious Kaoru, and felt a small sense of pity for him. "I did not take her from you, Daniel ... you killed her. Don't you remember?" His voice was beginning to take on an almost pleading sound as he tried to get through to the obsessed spirit. "Why can't you remember, Daniel? You have to remember ... You killed Cassandra ... She is dead. You saw her yourself."
"Fuck you, Fetlock. I might have thrown 'er over the edge, but it was your 'ands that kilt her. It was you that kilt me Princess, Eddy, you bloody Limey's son-of-a-whore. You kilt 'er when youtook her away from me."
"Daniel. I'm not Fet . . . "
"Shut the fuck up you bleedin' Rube." The ghost rolled over onto his side and sat part of the way up. "I'll get 'er back." He raised his hand and pointed a stern finger at Kenshin as his lips pealed back into a fiendish sneer. "Mark me words, Edmond Fetlock, I'll get her back and then it will be your soul that's goin' to rot in 'ell, not mine." And then the Ghost of Daniel March faded into the black of the tower and was gone.
"Noooo. Wait!" Kenshin reached out his hand toward the place where the dead man had lain, but he was no longer there. "No, please no." Looking up to where Cassandra's specter had stood, Kenshin found that she, too, had gone. He and Kaoru were alone ... again, but he was no closer to knowing what to do than he had been before. He had not saved them from anything.
"Kaoru," He gently touched her pale cheek with tender fingers, and then stood up with her in his arms. "It is way past time we got the hell out of here, Honey." His voice was low and hard as flint as he turned and walked out of the doorway and back into the chilled night air and the freedom they should have found a long time before now.
It was a long walk back to the bluff, and when they got there, everyone was freaking out.
"What the hell happened up there??" Sano's voice and face were filled with terrified worry as he looked into Kenshin's stony face. "Kenshin?"
"What happened to my sister? What's wrong with Kaoru??" Yahiko was at Kenshin's side
pulling on his sleeve in frightened anxiety. "Mr. Himura? Is Kaoru gonna be Ok? Mr. Himura??"
"Himura?" Misao came to stand next to him, and, touching his arm softly, was able to get him to look at her. The emotions and unspoken thoughts reflected in his glittering golden eyes made her catch her breath. "Oh no . . . " She whispered as she tightened her grip slightly. "We gotta gets her back home fast, don't we?" He nodded sharply, and moved past her walking steadily back down the luff toward the rickety bridge. Even Ruakii seemed worried as he collected Yahiko, Quii, and Tomoe and started them back along the edge of the bluff behind Kenshin's retreating form. Aoshi pulled up next to a stunned and worried Misao and gently took her hand in his, and tugging gently on it, pulled her along behind him. Sano ran up beside the silently walking couple and whispered something to Aoshi who nodded his head in agreement, and then, leaving a gapping Megumi behind with them, Sano headed down the bluff after Kenshin.
"Hey, hang on. You can't go across the bridge alone with her like that. Wait up, will ya?" Sano quickly loped up beside Kenshin and fell into step beside him. Worry and curiosity welled up inside of him, but he did not dare say a word. Not after looking at the expression on Kenshin's face when he had come back from the Lighthouse carrying an unconscious Kaoru. Besides, his eyes were that creepy yellow-gold color again, and Sano did not want to mess with him while he was in THAT kind of a mood. He was remembering all to well what had happened the last time Kenshin's eyes had turned that color. Right now all he was really worried about was the Kamiya girl. She and her brat brother were the Wards of Dr. And Mrs. Gensai and if anything serious had happened to her out there tonight ... well, the shit was really going to hit the fan.
As he looked down at her pale still features, Sano shivered, remembering what had been going on while Kenshin and the girl were gone inside the Lighthouse. The rest of the group had been standing out on the bluff in helpless shock and growing fear as they listened to all of the screaming and arguing that had started going on over there ... But not only that, they had been listening to all of the DIFFERENT voices that had been involved with the screaming and arguing. There were far more than just two people responsible for all of that noise, and that fact had gotten them all really spooked, but when Kenshin had showed up with an unconscious Kaoru in his arms, everything became all too real and it was not a game anymore. Suddenly it really did not matter who won the bet or who lost. They all just wanted to get the hell out of there and get Kaoru home so they could make sure she was all right.
October 29, 2001
Sunday, 03:17 A.M.
Girl's Dormitory, Ive Payne High School
As he continued to tenderly cradle the unconscious body of Kaoru Kamiya in his arms, Kenshin quietly followed Misao through the back door of the girl's dormitory. This was one thing he had never thought he would be doing while enrolled at Ive Payne, and that was sneaking into the girl's dorm without coming to 'see' someone. Of course, at this point in time, that was the farthest thing from his mind. Right now all he wanted to do was get Kaoru to her room, lay her down, and try to see if he could her to wake up. The fact that she was still unconscious was causing him a great deal of worry and anxiety. It was becoming tantamount that he be positively certain she was physically alright and that she was lucid and coherent in her mind. He would never be able to sleep until he knew what had happened to her mind after it had been invaded by the spirit of Daniel March, and Kenshin also knew that he could never forgive himself if she had been hurt in any way. After all, had he not been the one to promise her that everything would be all right? Had he not said, that all she had to do was stay close to him and he would not let anything bad happen to her? Guilt and self recrimination were bouncing around in his head and gnawing at his soul until he almost felt as if he could drop to his knees and cry, but, of course, he would never let that happen. He would never give into that kind of emotion ... especially with Misao right here. Yet, he could not shake the worry nor the anxiety that chewed on his conscience.
To tell the truth, Kenshin could not remember when he had ever felt so worried about anyone ... except maybe Soujiro ... or Cleo. He worried about Cleo all of the time. He worried about her learning to talk, learning to read, learning to write, learning how to draw things the right way. He worried about her having nightmares while he was not there to chase the monsters away, and he worried about her growing up with out ever really knowing who he was. That was the one thing Kenshin worried about the most. He was afraid Cleo would never really know who he was, and that when he finally got out of this hell-hole, she probably would not want too. Thanks to his parents.
"In here." Misao's hissing whisper caught Kenshin's attention back to the present and he silently ducked through the door she was holding open. As he stepped inside, she closed the door and flipped on the light.
"Geez ... Misao!" Kenshin gritted between his teeth as the brightness of the light pierced
through his head and tried to tear his eyes out of their sockets. "You could warn a guy, you know."
"Sorry," She apologized lamely and shrugged. "Didn't think about it."
"Fine," He glared at her with glittering amethyst jewels and then looked expectantly over at the neatly made bed and waited. With a flurry of flustered gestures Misao walked over to the bed and pulled the top comforter and sheets down, and then watched with surprised eyes as Kenshin ever so gently laid Kaoru's body upon the soft mattress. Then she watched as he carefully laid Kaoru's legs out straight and then adjusted her head into a comfortable position on the downy pillow. 'I'll be damned,' Misao thought in surprise. 'He does have a heart in there after all ... who woulda thought?'
"Kaoru?" Kenshin called the name softly as he sat down next to her and reached out too gently brush some stray strands of black hair from her pale face. "Kaoru? Honey ... can you hear me? Wake up, Baby ... It's me ... It's Kenshin. Can you wake up for me? Please?" Misao continued to listen with a new insight on this exceptionally complex young man as his voice took on an unusual tone of urgency and she began to realize that something very important as well as something very terrible must have happened between these two during their harrowing visit to the Lighthouse.
"Kaoru ... Please wake up, Honey ... You are really starting to scare the shit out of me." Kenshin touched her cool cheek with his fingertips and then leaned down and very gently brushed his lips across hers in a worried yet tender kiss. "Please ... wake up." As his head dropped, his face was buried inside the thickness of her hair where it had piled up around her neck. "I have to know you are Ok, Kaoru. I have to know that He did not hurt you ... Please, Baby. You have to wake up." Kenshin's voice took on a thick husky tone as he burrowed deeper into the curve of her throat and he placed his arms tenderly on the mattress on either side of her shoulders so his hands could hold her. "Wake up, Kaoru ... Wake up."
"Himura?" Misao laid a soft hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Kenshin? Hey, guy ... what happened to you guys up there tonight? What happened to 'her'?"
"You would not believe me if I told you, Misao." Was his muffled reply. "Nobody would ...
It's too ... unreal."
"Yes I would." She knelt down on the floor next to his legs and put a trusting hand on his thigh. "I would believe you ... Hell, after listening to all of that screaming and shit that was coming from that place, I think I would believe just about anything you said."
"You heard all of that?" He lifted his head and looked down at her with violet eyes filled with shock.
"Of course ... we all did. Good grief, it sounded like someone was getting murdered in there ... ummm ... you know what I mean." She screwed her lips up in an embarrassed pout as she realized the unfortunate pun that she had inadvertently made.
"Yes, I do know what you mean, and, Misao ..." Those same shocked violet eyes took on a deadly serious gleam as they bore into her blue-green ones. "Someone did get murdered up there ... and Kaoru and I saw it. We saw the whole god-awful damn thing."
"You ... You saw ...?" Misao's eyes grew into huge round balls of astonishment as she tried to assimilate what Kenshin had just told her. "What the hell are you talking about? What did you see?"
"We stood and watched as Daniel March murdered his Wife, Misao. We watched him pick her up and throw her over the edge of the catwalk ... we saw it as if it were happening to real people."
"You're shitting me, Himura." Her head shook in abject denial.
"No. I am not." He looked back at Kaoru's pale face in sadness, and then continued. "She looked just like Kaoru ... just exactly alike."
"What?"
"Cassandra ... Her face ... it was Kaoru's face. They were exactly the same." Kenshin reached out tracing the line of Kaoru's cheekbone and jawline, then the gentle slope of her nose. "It was ... uncanny ... the resemblance. It was like looking at identical twins."
"Himura ... you are talking ... crazy."
"I knew you would not believe me, didn't I say so, Misao?" His voice twisted into a sardonic sneer as he turned away from her completely.
"Well, yeah but this is ... it's just ... it's ..."
"It's what?" He snapped. "Do you think we were up there making all of that fucking noise by ourselves? Or maybe, maybe we just happen to run into a couple of transients that NOBODY else did, and THEY scared the shit out of us."
"Himura ... Quiet down, or you'll have old man Gensai in here breathing down our necks."
"Whatever," He snorted. "I don't give a shit about old man Gensai."
"Fine ... maybe you don't but I do. I could get expelled for having you in here. Geez."
"So sorry ... I will try to be more ... cooperative in the future, Miss Machimaki."
"God. I forgot what a sarcastic asshole you really were."
"Glad I could take the opportunity to remind you."
"Shut-up. I'm your friend, remember?"
"With friends like you ..."
"Hey, you big jerk. If you don't want me to be your friend, all you have to do is ..."
"Misao ..." Suddenly the frustrated war of words between the two irritated friends was abruptly brought to a close as Kaoru's tiny whisper floated up and ended it. "Don't call Kenshin 'a jerk'. Ok?"
"Kaoru??" Both Kenshin and Misao were leaning over the pale girl's face in show of deep
concern. Kenshin's hand was trembling as it gently cupped her cool cheek and tilted her face so he could look into her eyes. "Kaoru ..." The softest and most tender smile Misao had ever seen in her life crossed the fine features of the confusing boy next to her. "Are you Ok?" He asked her in a gentle concerned voice. "Are you hurt or anything, Honey?"
Kaoru drew a deep shaky sigh and blinked her eyes several times as she tried to focus on the handsome face looking so intently into hers. "Kenshin?" Her hand shakily lifted from her stomach and covered his where it cupped her face. She could feel the warmth of his palm as it conformed to her cheek and she turned her face into that warmth even as she let her fingers slid in between his.
"Yes." He let his thumb tenderly stroke the softness of her skin as he leaned forward and rubbed his nose against hers. "Are you Ok?" He asked again as he pulled back slightly and worriedly searched her semi-glassy eyes. "Are you hurt or anything?"
"I... I don't think so." Her other hand rose and cupped his face as she looked into his concerned violet eyes. "But I do have a terrible headache." A small laugh escaped his lips just before he turned them into the palm of her hand and pressed a tender kiss against it.
"I would think so." He said quietly, and then met her eyes again. "Do you remember anything that happened? Do you remember going to the Lighthouse or anything that we did inside?"
"I..." Her delicate brows knitted in confusion as she searched his face for clues and answers, and then the dawning light of memory filled her face and those beautiful sapphire diamonds filled with tears. "Oh... nooo." Both hands came to cover her face as everything came back to her in the rush of a single moment. "Kennsshiin..." She sobbed and reached for him wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and shoulders even as he gathered her up and held her close against his heart.
"It is all right now, Tanuki." He whispered into the thickness of her hair as he pulled her closer feeling her tremble with shock and horror. "It is all over, and everything is all right now... I promise. It is all right... Do not cry, Tanuki... Please do not cry." Kenshin rocked Kaoru back and forth crooning softly to her as if she were a small child in need of comfort after a bad dream. His hand gently stroked the long length of her glossy black hair over and over as he tenderly pressed soft kisses against her neck and nape as he murmured soft words of solace into her sensitive ear.
Misao was completely taken aback as she watched the couple interact with each other. This was not something she would have ever thought she would see coming from Kenshin Himura, the original 'Stone Cold Heart'. Quietly she backed away from the two of them and slipped out of the door closing it quietly behind her leaving them alone. As she walked down the darkened hallway towards her own room, Misao decided that given Kaoru's bizarre behavior once she finally woke up, Kenshin must have been telling the truth, but if he was, that meant... She stopped in the middle of the hallway as a chill raced up her spine.
The Lighthouse was really haunted.
"Oh Shit!"
Back inside Kaoru's room Kenshin continued to hold her close to him as she sobbed uncontrollably in the aftermath of shocked realization. Her mind was screaming with fear and denial while her soul was shriveling inward upon itself in an instinctive desperation of trying to hide from the reality it was refusing to face. Horrible images of smoke-thin ghosts, plunging bodies, and rotted corpses stumbled and collided with one another within the jumbled erratic kaleidoscope that was her mind, while the reality of what was truth and what was fantasy seemed to be blurring into one edgeless gray world.
Kaoru thought she was going insane, all she could do was hold onto Kenshin and pray that her mind was not splintering into crystal fragments the way it had before... before... before...
Suddenly deep within her mind an image began to take shape. An image she had not allowed herself to look at or see for a very long time. It started out very small, no bigger than a mite, but then it began to grow and grow until it spread far and wide filling the infinite spaces of her mindscape. Blurry wavering lines of brilliant red, yellow, and orange swept across the dark backdrop of the picture, and then there were the glaring painful flashes of pure white that hurt her eyes to look at. It was so hard to see anything because it was all so blurry and out of focus... It was always that way. She could never quite bring the whole picture into a clear sharp image. All of the edges remained liquid and bled into one another as she ran through the leaping reds and oranges, and suddenly she could smell smoke and feel the tremendous heat on her skin. Then the screaming came. It always came after the smoke and the heat, but she could never finish the end of the image-vision. She could never finish it...
"Mother... Daddy..." The sound of Kaoru's anguished whisper against his shoulder startled Kenshin. 'Mother? Daddy?' He thought. 'What do her parents have to do with this?' Tenderly he pulled her back away from him just far enough so that he could look into her ravaged face, and what he saw there made his heart stop and his breath freeze in his lungs. Her face was a distorted mask of grief and sorrow unlike any he had ever witnessed before, and the look in her eyes was a million miles away. Kaoru was no longer thinking about what had happened up at the Lighthouse. She was back on the front lawn of her house watching it burn with her parents inside, but there was no way for Kenshin to know that. All he knew was she was trapped somewhere inside of herself. Somewhere very painful.
"Kaoru?" He spoke her name gently and raised a hand to tenderly wipe some of the wetness off her face. "Where are you, Tanuki? What can you see?"
"My house..." She whispered in a faraway voice. "It is my house."
"What about your house? What happened at your house?"
"It burned up... The furnace exploded and it burned up."
"Oh Honey, I'm so sorry."
"They could not get out." Kenshin felt an uneasy shiver race up his back as she spoke those soft cryptic words. "They were stuck in the hallway and they could not get out."
"Who, Baby? Who was stuck?" Even as he asked the question, Kenshin knew the answer.
"Mother and Daddy. They burned to death in the fire. I... I watched it burn with them inside. I watched it burn."
"Kaoru." With a feeling of extreme sadness Kenshin pulled her back against him and cradled her head beneath his chin while he started rocking her again. "I am sorry, Honey. I did not know your parents died in a fire, and I did not know you were there to see it either. I am so damn sorry."
"It was my fault..." As she spoke those quiet meaningful words, Kenshin reared back in open mouthed wide-eyed shock.
"What did you say?" He asked in a disbelieving voice.
"It was my fault." She repeated as her body went limp with grief. "I was the one responsible for the fire. It was my fault the furnace exploded. It is my fault my parents are dead." Tears began to stream down her face as she raised empty dead pools of cobalt blue to look into Kenshin's stunned face. "I killed them."
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There, chew on that for a few days. My Father-in-law is in the hospital so things might be running a bit slow over the next little while, but hang in there. I'm working on it.
Next up will be the new chapter for Master of High Tower
And then the new one for Beloved of The White Flame. A couple of weeks give or take. God Bless, and see ya soon.
Please Review.
Tsuki-san