So, I'm thinking of leaving this open for suggestions, though I don't know if I have enough readers for that. But if you have a suggestion, feel free to leave it in a review.

Warnings: God, I hate to say it, but pretty much the same as last time. This goes over several years and a few of the things mentioned have already been written or will be elaborated on. I might need to up the rating, which sucks. There's also one part (called Complicated) that comes in from a suggestion.

Disclaimer: don't own anything you recognize.

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"The Greatest Flaw"

Truth is that Kenshin's greatest weakness is other people. He's too impulsively reactive to the trouble's of others, too quick to act in defense of a friend or even of someone he doesn't know. He fights a war for the benefit of thousands; he fights to save the lives of his friends. It's simple, it's true, it's obvious, and adversaries have explioted it for the past eighteen years. And he hates himself for it.

What he doesn't realize, though, is that he becomes the weakness of others too. It's just not always in a good way.

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Eight.

This is when he originally becomes an unexpected flaw, when he becomes the guilty pleasure of a man three times his age and size. For Hideki, the slave becomes his first real vice. The screams become an anticipation, the struggle his release, the small, breakable body his drug. He becomes an unnecessary distraction. Knowing that he's the one to ruin the slave's life is an intoxicating notion. Hideki is a terrible person and doesn't mind a bit. He is also the first person the child hates, so the boy starves himself until he stops being desirable.

Then his purpose is gone and interest lost. Becoming useless is the greatest feeling in the world.

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More confusing is Kaito, who owns him but feels sympathy at the time. He is not like the other two who crave the physical but young Shinta's reactions speak of volumes of another man's sexual deprivation. It doesn't take long for the boy to become his weakness as well, but in a better way. Despite their delicate, complicated situation, he feels protective. A child this young and sweet does not deserve the treatment he formerly reserved. So he gives him money when he goes off to town like he would a servant rather than a slave, and buys him a toy to play with. The first time Shinta smiles feels like Kaito's first true achievement since the end of the war.

But then he falls from grace and kills himself with his last shred of honor. He doesn't know that the boy cries at his funeral though if he did, he would feel very ashamed.

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Minoru is less complicated, a little more predictable. The slave becomes his vice the moment he lays his eyes on him. This weakness is like Hideki's but stronger. He attacks the kid again and again, over and over until the first signs of insanity begin to surface. Until the first cracks begin to form on the mind.

This continues until the belated survival instincts kick in. Right before he dies, he is treated to the sight of wide amber eyes and knows he should've put more effort in keeping the kid at arm's length.

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Nine.

Hiko's unwanted paternal feelings begin to grow the first moment the boy breaks all boundaries and hugs him around the middle, having to reach up because of his small height. He is young and traumatized and plagued by nightmares. The swordsmen never thought he'd take in an apprentice this off in the head but here the boy is anyway, breaking down his carefully constructed walls. He waits until the kid falls asleep at night and wakes up at the slightest sign of a nightmare. He flinches every time the child throws up from the food and is forced to focus two months on cleaning the boy up, both mentally and physically. There's so much wrong that it's almost unbelievable.

Kenshin never tells him he's killed a man, but Hiko knows anyway. He isn't entirely sure the boy knows himself whatever lurks in the back of his own mind, what secrets twist in his subconscious.

When he is ready to begin training and proves himself a prodigy of unexpected skill, Hiko finally asks, "How are your nightmares?"

The boy looks at him direct in the face, expressionless. "You don't dream if you don't sleep," he answers.

Though this is unnerving, he drops it. He can't risk losing anymore time even if his apprentice is a genius. He needs to learn how to protect himself because Hiko can't do that job forever and it's only a matter of time before this repression goes away. So he teaches the boy his first strikes and pays him no compliments.

And this is Hiko's weakness: Kenshin becomes a son and he will protect the child until the very end.

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Thirteen.

As a mother of two boys - men now - and a girl on the verge of marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Okami is cursed to care for all the children that pass through her life. Even if the child is the most skilled killer she has ever met with half his sanity gone and eyes that change as often as his moods.

On a Monday in February, he tells her, "Thank you for your help, Okami-san, but I don't need it. It's late, you should sleep."

Rarely does Himura come home dirty from a fight, but somehow he's managed to get the ends of his hair messy with blood and yes, she needs her sleep and yes, he can do it himself, but she worries about him. Besides, she promised Kogoro-san, and she doesn't plan on breaking that any time. There's a slash mark on his cheek that he insists is an accident. She's doubtful, but cleans the blood out of his hair and patches up his face. Kogoro-san will be having a talk with him later, she knows.

"You should get some too," she says when she finishes, standing and kissing the top of his head. Though he stiffens, he doesn't say anything anymore because he's gotten used to her mothering him by this point. Himura reminds her too much of her youngest despite his career path and really, she just can't help herself. "Find me in the morning. I'll make you breakfast."

He mumbles something as she leaves.

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Complicated.

And this is the strange one. It spans several years and several forms and by the end of Bakumatsu, neither is quite sure what happened. The man's name is Saito Hajime and all logic says he should be smarter than this.

First, the boy lies and he likes him. At thirteen, the kid is Kenshin. He wants to protect him from the war. Then Saito finds out the truth in the worst possible way and they hate each other. At fifteen, the boy is Battousai. Now he is obsessed with killing him.

At twenty three, the boy is Himura and Saito's weakness becomes a mix between the two. Because life's a bitch, and that's all there is to it.

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Fourteen.

The first time Tomoe knows that she loves her husband (or pretend husband because despite playing the roles, there was no ceremony and he's not of age yet anyway) is the night he falls asleep against her side.

Daytime is warm but nights are cold and the two have gotten into the habit of curling up together, wrapped in a blanket and she could never find it in her to disagree. Even in her deepest period of denial, she was forced to admit that he's terribly attractive - in a young sort of way, of course. Normally she falls asleep first, snuggled tight against him and sitting with her back to the wall and when she wakes up, she's in bed again, slipped under the covers, and Kenshin is nowhere to be seen. But tonight, this night where she saw his calm demeanor crack and had a glimpse of the real boy underneath, is the first time she finally witnesses the sadness and vulnerability he hides behind his quietness.

To be quite honest, she feels almost flattered.

And it's in this moment, this singular pinpoint in time, when her denial finally breaks and she knows that she is as incredibly, irreversibly in love with him as he is with her and has been for quite some time. She's already given up her body (it was funny the first time, in retrospect, all fumbling and oh-god-are-we-doing-this-right and blushing silences in the aftermath) but she hadn't expected to give up her heart along with it. But here she is anyway, smiling softly at the exactly-her-size figure pressed flush against her as relief floods her. Suddenly she's able to bleed away the hatred she'd been clinging onto and come to terms with the truth that a woman can have more than one love in her life. Even ones that defy all logic.

"I will always protect you, Kenshin," she whispers into his hair and not too long later, drifts off to sleep as well.

Before she succumbs to dreams, she thinks that when the time comes, she will not let him die.

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Eighteen.

Shishio wants to take over Japan one day and doesn't care about anyone's acceptance of him. Even so, it's seeing Kogoro and the boy together that makes him decide that the only way to ever truly become whole is to destroy Battousai in both body and soul.

"I still can't believe you're just letting me leave, Katsura," says Battousai, pulling his hair back, and the informal tone they speak to each other in is disgustingly disrespectful. When he rules Japan, no one will speak that way to him. Ruling with fear is the only way to command, not grow any form of familiarity and this is why the Meiji government must fall to him.

"I promised," answers Kogoro, waving his hands away. Battousai scowls, but it seems halfhearted, or at least looks so from Shishio's obscured viewing point outside the window. "If you don't want to be recognized, tie your hair low. Red is noticeable enough as is."

Unsurprisingly, Battousai does as instructed and the smile he gives doesn't reach his eyes. There's no trace that Shishio can see of the boy he's constantly being called second rate because of. His blood boils, his hatred growing. This short, skinny child who right now is still younger than he was when he first began and looks too slight to hold a sword. This...thing is supposedly stronger than he? This is the one he's been told he can't even compare to?

Kogoro tells the Battousai, this boy, this barrier that needs to he needs to be rid of, "Come find me some day, or at least send word. And go find happiness, Kenshin. You sure as hell deserve it."

"Oro?"

If he ever wants to take over this nation, Battousai needs to die - slowly, painfully - and Shishio will keep training because is no way that he has ever been and ever will be second-rate.

This obsession will be the end of him.

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Twenty-Three.

First, there is Kaoru. She is seventeen and falls in love too easily. But it's the day that Kenshin first joins her that she realizes she's never really been in love before. She worries when he's gone, worries when he's there, worries when he fights. She once promised her father that she would never marry someone damaged, but here she is anyway, screaming at him to stop as Sanosuke holds her back and crying because nothing is working. The fight is intense and harder than anything she's every seen, so much anger poured into every blow from both he and the policeman that she knows that Battousai, that this other personality of his, is slowly taken over.

And it's this misunderstanding that makes him her weakness. It's a thousand times more complex than anything an innocent soul will ever understand.

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Second comes Yahiko. He is ten-years-old and simple. He doesn't understand enough and knows it. But he has the same flaw as any little boy his age and would do anything to prove himself to his role model. What he doesn't realize is that becoming like Kenshin comes at a price that he would never be able to pay.

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When Kenshin enters Sanosuke's life, he comes with a sword and a cross shaped scar and the title of "patriot." Sano thinks the man's like the rest, false idealism and corruption that he doesn't understand accompanies every form of government that's ever existed. He doesn't want to kill him, not like the others, and it takes the guy beating him to make him realize that people aren't as black and white as he thinks they are. Kenshin isn't a weakness, but he's his best friend and that's practically the same thing.

So he throws himself into a fight he knows he'll lose because Kenshin's unconscious body lays five feet away from him and fuck this bandage guy if he thinks Sanosuke will really believe he's dead.

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Megumi is different from all of them. She loves Kenshin but she knows from the beginning, unlike Kaoru, that there's something rotting inside of him that will never go away. When she looks at him, she sees that there's a piece that's already missing, that has already been given to someone else and is untouchable. And she decides it not even worth it to try.

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So, it's shorter than the last two but I like it this way. Also, apparently (according to wiki), Kenshin, Tomoe, and Kaoru are all roughly five one and weight one hundred five pounds.