Seeing the girl again - sleeping, prisoner, safe in her bindings - Kenshin felt a knot inside himself loosen. He remembered her arms twining around him through the hail and rain, thin arms around his armor, a constant pressure, surprisingly strong. He remembered her wide eyes, insisting that he knew her, insisting that he had some answer.
He had heard rumors of an angry demon. He knew the captain feared that a spirit had sent the storm.
The old man selling cloth had lied to them - lied about the girl, but...
It was him. Something about himself. She had only looked at him.
.
He sensed her shift more than he heard her. The soldiers carrying her palanquin kept walking, disciplined to remain steady, oblivious.
He looked at her then. Those eyes of hers - so open. Kenshin had never met anyone with eyes like hers.
"I don't know why you lied," he heard himself telling her, "but I believe that you have done no harm."
Again some meaning in her glance - if he could hear her... What would she tell him? What did she know?
She hung her head then, her hair falling like a curtain around her face.
Kenshin kicked his horse to join the other samurai.
.
Green fields, gleaming like lichen in the rain. Poor people hurried out of the path as the army marched near. A few merchants approached, carrying food to sell or barter.
Some of the men had taken small treasures from the town - lacquer boxes, jewelry. They stood on the side of the road while the other soldiers kept riding and marching. They stood with helmets in one hand, trinkets in the other, haggling.
Kenshin turned his head away from them.
A woman with dark eyes working in the field met his eyes - a startled glance of fear - before she quickly bowed her head back to her work. Further on, an old woman watched them all pass. Sorrow in her weathered face. Resignation.
So he hadn't changed.
His world hadn't changed.
It was something about the girl.
.
It was evening before he saw her again. The captain had seen to it that she had a tent. "I'll watch her," he told the guard, his voice low.
Heishi huffed. "I'll be just outside. I won't hesitate to stop you if you're bewitched."
Kenshin just rolled his eyes and waited for the other man to leave.
The girl was still, listening. He knelt down next to her and began to untie her.
"If you try to escape, we will stop you. We will hurt you," he assured her. "Even if you call a demon, we will fight until we are dead."
"I don't know anything about demons," she croaked.
"My name is Kenshin," he told her.
"I know. My name is Kaoru."
Kaoru. Watching him, rubbing her wrists, watching him as calmly as if they had known each other all their lives.
"Who are you?"
Her lips twitched as though she would have smiled, or frowned. Her gaze slid to a far corner of the tent. "I don't know. I was wandering in the mountain. I think. I don't remember. It's what they told me, the monks who found me. They named me."
"Why did you come here?"
She shook her head then faced him again. "Only to sell cloth, to bring back tools to the sanctuary."
"Why were you in disguise?"
"For safety on the road."
"How do you know me?"
"I... think I dreamed you." Staring at him then, seeming to beg him to know her, to be known by her. "...Who are you?"
Kenshin found himself remembering every face that had ever looked at him so closely - the women in the fields, the men he had fought. He found himself remembering the silences, the frenzies, the hot splashes of blood. Who was he to her..? Who was he but...
"I am a samurai. I am a sword. I'm not alive. I go into every battle already knowing myself dead."
She... She started to weep. Softly. She was weeping.
"I... know you. Somehow. Something in me knows you."
Was there something...? Before the wars, before death, before the daimyo. His mother and his father. Hunger. "I... used to live near a village, when I was small. My parents were peasants."
She was staring at him again. "Perhaps... If I could remember my past..."
Compassion.
Hope.
Sadness.
Compassion and hope and sorrow in her eyes.
He couldn't withstand it. Kenshin closed his eyes.
"You're like... Yahiko. Like you're... bleeding." Her voice soft. He felt the warmth of her hand as a she reached toward him, toward the wound on his cheek, nearly touching him. Loss as she pulled her hand away.
Silence for a moment. Then - "What will happen to me?"
Kenshin opened his eyes. What could he tell her? If the daimyo, if the shamans needed someone to blame for their defeat... And she... She wasn't like anyone else. And she had no one who would avenge her.
"I don't know."
Just then a chill wind rose around them. Kaoru shivered.
"I hate the cold," she told him.
He answered, "Me, too."
.