***WARNING***

Mention of un-living oneself.

THE MASTER

The sun was just about to set by the time the man reached the village. It casted the sky in shades of stark red and gold, stretched out by the wistful warble of birds as they returned home. The rustle of leaves betrayed the cool breeze before it hit. The few souls trodding the dirt road bundling up in response. At this rate, it'd be snowing before the next full moon.

He had asked around about the boy, but while half the villagers didn't know, the rest simply ignored him, returning to their fields, homes and hearths without a second thought. It was getting irksome. He just wanted to know the boy was being taken care of; he couldn't care less who he was with as long as the boy had a roof over his head. Just that. Find that out and he'd be well on his way to enjoy the first snow with a warm bottle of sake. Too bad he'd ran out of village…

Then, a curious pair of beady eyes caught his gaze as they peeked out from a hut. He smirked: If anyone knew anything about the boy, it'd be a nosy old geezer. And yet.

"He's not here?!" the man blurted, startling the otherwise nonchalant old man.

"Uh— Nope," he insisted, scratching the back of his balding head as if to regain his composure before the stranger. It was subtle, but enough for his voice to sound as hoarse and brittle as it did before when he added: "No kid, no stray cat, nobody's come this way f'r a week."

Taking his leave, the man continued south towards the desecrated glade, while a somber thought started to take form in his head: Could he have…? No, he frowned. The boy's youth made suicide seem unlikely, no matter how dire the situation. However, the fact did little to raise any hope; the cold would have most certainly taken him during the night anyway. As though in response to that logic, the spindly shadows of trees started to creep over the road, their winding fingers reaching inside his mind: Even when I wield my sword, I haven't been able to save a soul too many times more than I'd like. I kill. And kill. And kill. And still they are like maggots; evil just springing from the decomposing corpse of this country. By that point the last traces of gold had faded from the sky, the forest now a realm of shadows cut by slivers of eeirie, blood-red light. There will be more acts like this; all I can do is bury the innocents. He concluded with a heavy heart as he stepped through the veil of trees before the glade.

He gasped.

Wide-eyed, he gazed at the glade under the agonizing light of dusk. Grass now a thorny, rugged field by the dozens of mounds; makeshift graves pierced by round and pointy stakes, rudely crafted from twigs and the carcass of a cart, where only the wooden wheels remained as evidence. And in the midst of it all, a small, frail figure struggled with a rock.

"You buried not just your family, but the bandits too…?" he asked as he reached the tuft of deep-red hair almost lost in the waning light.

The boy turned around, surprised. A glint of fear grew in his glassy eyes as he took the towering man in, the memories of that night still too fresh in the dried tears on his cheeks. But as quickly as it came, it went. The boy turned once more since rolling the rock apparently held more importance to him than acknowledging the giant man with a sword who had saved his life the night before, eh?

"Slavers."

"Huh?"

"Mom and dad died last year, 'said it was cholera," the boy explained, seemingly satisfied as he placed the rock in its rightful spot. Lucky he was looking forwards; pity was not something the man was keen on sharing, even if the recipient was a boy not a day over six years old at most.

"And you still made graves for them…?" He insisted, but the boy just shrugged, wiping their nose before offering: "Bandits and slavers look the same when they are dead, so…"

Silence.

A thousand children enduring the same night wouldn't have come up with such logic. But then again, not a single thing about that boy was ordinary: The deep red hair, the still gaze, the strange garbs that he was wearing. He'd never seen something like it. He'd been wandering around for some time and he'd never crossed path with the winding lines that run side by side just to cross each other, then side by side and cross again and again.. It was all… foreign.

So, everything the man could do was to hold on to the only familiar shape in that otherwise unreal landscape: He would finally address the three small stones carefully placed before the boy: "What are those?"

"Kasumi-san, Akane-san, Sakura-san," the boy answered, looking at each of them in turn as if presenting them to the man. "They were sold to pay some debt. Only knew 'em for a few days but I was the only boy, no parents around, so I… had to protect them. But I—" the words got stuck in his throat as he suddenly got smaller.

Head tucked in, shoulders up, stiff, and tiny hands now balled-up in white-knuckled fists. "— That's why I wanted to find them good stones, so that no-one forgets. But these were all I could find. And there were no flowers either…"

The man closed his eyes and slowly, almost affectionately, opened the clay bottle he had been carrying in hopes of enjoying at least one win since the start of fall. "Man or woman, to die without knowing the taste of good sake is a crime," he started, pouring a good half of it over the three stones as the boy looked on. "This offering is the least I can do."

"What is your name, boy?"

"Kemushi."

The man frowned. "That's not a name for a swordsman. From now on, your name will be 'Kenshin,'" he declared, placing a heavy hand on the boy's head. Big eyes gazed at him in awe from below the wild tuff of hair. "I shall teach you… My most precious knowledge." You will become the greatest swordsman of them all.

This will be the end of the canon-ish chapters for a while. So buckle up: from now on, "here be dragons."

Feedback is more than welcome. This is my first serious attempt at writing, English is *not* my mother tongue, and it's only me, chat gpt and a bottle of wine to proofread this baby. Just be gentle with me, senpai 3

Almost forgot: Why Ainu-Kenshin? It seemed the truest-to-source-material way to actually write a redhead in 1800's Japan. Plus, points for story shenanigans in the near future.

Thank you for reading!