- Chapter 6 -

I am so sorry that I have yet to update this book until now, but I finally feel free enough from my depression to write, and I cannot wait to finish this book. Thank you to those who have recently followed me, as you have inspired me to take up fanfiction writing once more.

I do not own any original characters or plotlines of the manga Rurouni Kenshin. Nobuhiro Watsuki wrote that great manga. I am just creating my version of how I want Misao to end up with Aoshi.

Aoshi-Misao Forever!

End of Author's Note-

Misao's POV:

She couldn't believe how things had turned out as she walked hand-in-hand with her husband to the dining room, where the others were gathered, waiting to hear her story. Misao was married to her one true love, and now she had to tell the others about her failure.

Misao had told her husband of her rape and then how she had slain those who had tortured her that horrific day. He had reacted favorably to her planned murder of those men and had said that he would have hunted them down and slain them if he had known.

Still, Misao had no idea as to how the others would act. She didn't want Himura and Kaoru to feel uncomfortable in their friendship after knowing the lengths Misao had gone to by planning the killing of those bastards. Kaoru and Himura were very plainly against killing others, and she feared their friendship would be tainted by the knowledge that she had killed very recently or that she had killed because she was coming back to Kyoto after seeing them.

Misao clenched her teeth as she entered the dining hall with Aoshi, and the others in the room had gone silent with anticipation. She had to have courage but didn't know how to start the conversation, which made her supremely anxious. She and Aoshi took their seats, and he squeezed her hand, giving her the necessary strength from his sure hold of her hand.

Aoshi's hand squeezed her own, and she looked to her right so that she could lock eyes with him. Her panic made his heart clench, but he had to give her a blank look so that she could get her courage back. If he were to look at her softly, she would break.

Misao sighed and grit her teeth before retelling her story with a hollow voice and a blank but faraway look in her eyes…

FLASHBACK:

Misao quickly visited Kaoru's place just after the Enishi saga ended. She had argued with Aoshi about forgiving himself. In that argument, Misao had told him to quit wallowing in despair when his family was waiting for him to return. He may have physically returned to them, but with the return of his comrades and their burial at the Aoiya, Aoshi had retreated into himself.

Misao was immensely frustrated with the stubborn, solemn man she loved with every fiber of her being. She thought they were getting somewhere when Aoshi asked her to come with him to take Hannya and the others back home. However, the pain from seeing their skulls once more had made him shrink into himself once more.

On the day of their reburial, a couple of days after returning home, Misao had the worst argument with Aoshi she could remember. He had been isolating himself from the second they returned home and wouldn't even let her into the temple to give him food and tea. Finally, she stood outside of the closed and barred temple doors, shouting at him, "How could you ask me to come with you to bring them home and then act a coward by hiding from me and refusing to go to their burial?!"

She could hear his angry footsteps start as soon as she had said "coward," but she could care less if she offended him now. He was being such an ass by not letting her in to the temple, hiding from the others. All of that she could have let go, but him not coming to the service enraged her, "You disgrace them Aoshi!"

This was the first time she had called his name without the "-sama" attached at the end, and it shocked him into stopping his approach. He was on the other side of the doors, she knew, but she continued with a tearful voice, "They would not want you to suffer with this unfounded guilt of yours. They died with pride, knowing they protected their Okashira. You should respect their decision by being a man and coming to the funeral."

She'd pricked his pride again, and he slammed the temple doors open and fixed an incensed glare at her. Misao raised her eyebrow in a silent challenge for him to deny the truth in her words. This may have made the old Misao shrink back in fear, but this new Misao was more women with every passing day, and she demanded change from Aoshi here.

"Is that how you talk to your Okashira, Misao?" The title must have slipped out, as he had been the Okashira for so long. Realistically, she knew he knew she had claimed the title for herself. But this showed he did not believe her capable of leading the Oniwaban.

Indignance filled her with his blatant lack of respect. Between the two of them, no one knew how he had not seen her hand rise and successfully slap him.

She narrowed her eyes at him, saying, "I will treat Aoshi….my subordinate….any way I'd like since I am the Okashira now after he lost his soul to a drug lord." She hissed out the last two words of her mini speech.

She paused momentarily, seeing shock fill his eyes at her daring to talk to him this way and lay a hand on him. His Misao had never spoken one harsh word to him, but now she was claiming authority over him.

Oh yes, he had never wanted her to be a part of the Oniwaban, but he gave up that right long ago when he had left. Jiya had let her into the Oniwaban when she was twelve and personally trained her. So, when Aoshi lost himself to his battle to be the strongest, she claimed the Okashira title.

"Since my subordinate is failing himself, his Okashira, and the dead, I must shock him with hurtful words into doing what is right." Misao knew she was treading a dangerous path by her harshness. Still, if she wanted him to have his title back eventually, he needed to wake the hell up!

She gripped the collar of his yukata and yanked him to her so she could glare up into his eyes, "Now, your Okashira is demanding you to get your ass over to the garden and say goodbye to our friends. If you don't, then end it all right now! I don't want to keep waiting for a dead man to come back to me. I don't know this Aoshi anymore, and it kills me. You are slowly killing me, and you don't even notice. I love you Aoshi, and don't want you to die, but if you don't wake up to the world around you right now. By God, I will kill you myself."

Tears were dripping off her chin in torrents, and she was shocked by her telling him to kill himself already. She couldn't take his coldness another day. Misao couldn't stand him hiding from her anymore. With those last words, she pushed him with her grip on his yukata and stormed off.

Misao started running at the first sob at the end of the courtyard leading up to the temple. She did not want him to hear her cries.

She ran the whole way from the temple to the Aoiya and into her room with one intent. Misao had to leave Kyoto. She changed out of her funeral kimono into her ninja outfit and packed a bag. Misao hadn't remembered the stories about the rival ninja clan attacking women on the path from Kyoto to Tokyo. If she had, she would have disguised herself as a boy and taken to the trees instead of the main path.

Misao paused in her retelling, hearing Kaoru and Megumi gasp at her last sentences; they could already tell where this was going.

She nodded grimly at the girls. Their eyes were glossing over with tears before Misao continued her story.

Nothing happened to her on the way to the dojo of Kaoru Kamiya, and when Kaoru's eyes found Misao's in the middle of her lesson, the older girl dismissed her students, knowing something had happened to see Misao so soon after just a week of returning to Kyoto.

When the last student left the premises, Misao started sobbing. It took a week to calm Misao down with her anger towards Aoshi and another three days to convince her to return home. Yes, the visit was short, and it was what Misao needed to get her bearings back. However, if she had remained for another day, Misao might not have been on the path of the Yaro just outside of Kyoto.

Misao was much smaller back then and could not fight off the ten men attacking her. She had killed four, but that had taken much of her kunai supply.

Suddenly, one of the Yaros got a lucky shot by shooting her with an arrow as she tried to jump trees to get away. She had fallen from a thin branch in the middle of a decently tall tree and blacked out as soon as she hit the ground.

When she woke, she was in a clearing and naked. She knew something had happened to her already because the pain between her legs was severe. Her face was sticky around her mouth, and a foul taste echoed in her taste buds. Misao assessed her body with closed eyes and painfully noticed her rear side aching. Sickened, she wanted to throw up but held it back, trying to sense if others were around her. No one was. She thanked her lucky stars but fearfully kept her eyes shut as she started to re-examine her injuries.

Could she get up, she didn't know, but she could tell that whoever it was that attacked her had not only done so sexually but had tried to kill her.

Vaguely, she could remember when the group had taken turns violating her, sometimes with more than one person doing so. She had tried to scratch, bite, and kick them away from her, but that only made them angry enough to stab and slash at her with her own kunai.

She was bleeding from several shallow stab wounds to her abdomen, between her legs, and her thigh also had been cut. She couldn't tell how bad it was, but she was burning on her right inner thigh. Maybe they had tried to sever her femoral artery. Should she just let it kill her? She considered doing just that before branches cracked a couple of feet away.

Misao once again paused her retelling of the story to check on how the others responded. Okon, Omasu, Kaoru, and Megumi were wide-eyed, attempting to wipe away their tears, but they kept falling. Okina's eyes were assessing Misao as if understanding had suddenly dawned on him. Shiro, Kuro, Sano, and Yahiko looked enraged but nervous about saying the wrong thing to her. Himura looked at the floor before him, guilt seeping from his pores.

Misao spoke, "It's not your fault, Kenshin. I was too distracted, so I didn't notice their presence. I was also too arrogant in my skills to take care of myself against three. However, I didn't expect to be met with ten large men. Too arrogant indeed." Misao shook her head at her ignorance back then.

Kenshin opened his mouth to say something, but Aoshi grunted at that moment. Next to her, Aoshi was as stiff as a board, and his grip on her hand was powerful, indeed. He hissed out, "It was not your fault. It was mine because I never trained you against attacks such as those. I had wanted you to keep out of the Oniwaban life even after you claimed the title of Okashira. Your innocence of battle was precious, and I had wanted to…" He stopped talking as his throat had gotten tight with emotion.

Misao's heart filled with warmth at his words, "Aoshi-anata, I never blamed you for what happened to me, so please don't blame yourself. We cannot change the past, and besides…I got to train with Hiko-sama."

"Oro!" Kenshin said with shock, "Master trained you Misao-dono?"

"Yes, Kenshin, he was, after all, the one who found me dying on the forest floor." Misao laughed at the shocked look on everyone's faces. Everyone but her husband was stunned. She had remembered his presence in the trees but had stubbornly kept her composure.

Misao wasn't opposed to him knowing about her training with Hiko-sama. She didn't want him to find out the story of why she was learning from the man. Misao remembered tightening her obi and sliding into a defensive stance. She would show the man that she could take care of herself and deserved the title of Okashira. Maybe it would prove to Misao that she didn't have to be afraid of traveling alone again.

Also, she knew that she needed to get stronger to get her revenge on those men who had used her body. Sighing, she shook herself from her thoughts and again continued retelling the story of why the Yaro hates Misao.

Flinching at the sudden noise, her eyes flew open, and she clumsily sat up and tried crawling away backward from the large man coming nearer to her. At first, she didn't recognize him, but with a sudden movement from him, a cloak covered her naked body.

At that moment, the moon shifted from behind the clouds, beaming its light on Seijuro Hiko, Kenshin's sword master. She thought that he must have been drawn here by the smell of the blood. It permeated the forest, choking her with the memories of what happened to her. She wrapped the cloak around her naked body and tried to stand.

Hiko-san had gotten there first and picked her up into his arms. She whispered in a frightened, childlike voice, "Don't take me to the Aoiya. This will prove to him that I'm not strong enough."

Surprisingly, Hiko said nothing, and he said, "I'll take you to my place to recuperate, and then I will train you so that this shall never happen again. It's your damned Okashira's fault for not teaching a female ninja how to defend herself from these kinds of men."

She said nothing to correct him about who Okashira was because she surely did not feel like one right now.

It had taken Misao three weeks to recover from the bruises on her face and her mangled thigh. This was when she could walk, without limping, from Hiko's to the Aoiya to grab the training journals of her father, grandfather, and Aoshi. She also no longer smelled like blood, so she was safe to go to the Aoiya and return before anyone knew what had happened to her. Hiko had walked her to the city's outskirts to ensure those men would not finish the job. He said he'd wait until she returned and demanded she be quick, or he would leave her to fend for herself while walking back to his hut to start her training.

She was only allowed to watch Hiko practice with his sword because she was recovering from one pretty deep stab wound that missed all the vital parts and two shallow stab wounds around it. They were also not vital wounds. Still, they bled a lot the first few days. Her thigh wound had come close to cutting the femoral artery and was very deep, but Hiko had managed to stop the bleeding once he made it to his hut after finding her in the woods.

Misao knew she was lucky to be able to walk at all because her leg had been injured so badly. She still felt very stiff approaching the Aoiya grounds. Would Aoshi be there? She had been gone for a while and had no news on whether Aoshi had committed seppuku after she had told him to go and off himself. Realistically, she knew Aoshi was more man than that, but still, she worried she had been too harsh on him.

A sudden thought made her pause before entering the Aoiya gates; what if Aoshi had heard from the Yaro about what they had done to their Okashira?

Panic choked her throat before she pushed that down and realized that maybe the Yaro clan didn't know she was the Okashira. Her takeover had been silent and peaceful, with the distant Oniwaban already submitting themselves to her without a problem. They had heard about the previous Okashira's madness and were proud that the daughter of another Okashira had claimed her birthright, even if she was unskilled in battle. She was an expert paper pusher and intelligence agent, for she blended right in with the crowd and was so unsuspicious that no one would be the wiser to her being a ninja.

She dismissed her rambling thoughts when she felt Aoshi's ki awaken and brush against hers as if he had just noticed her presence. Misao felt relief that he was alive but hurried to her office to retrieve the journals before he could approach her.

She brought her ki down to just an ember to not induce the others to notice her arrival.

Misao reached her office door and slid open the shoji when she felt his presence against her back. He wasn't touching her but had sneaked up on her so fast that she stumbled into her room and whirled around in fear.

After what had happened to her three weeks ago, she wasn't good at being snuck up on. She tried to calm her rapidly beating heart at being frightened.

Aoshi entered the office. She couldn't tell if he had noticed her fear, but he looked intensely at her with an unreadable expression.

"You're hurt."

She started to deny his words, but he interrupted her with, "I smell the medicine. And Himura had sent word that you were returning weeks ago. You never arrived."

Misao tried to dismiss it with her hand, waving away his words and a laugh, "Oh, I took a bad spill falling out of a tree and twisted my knee. Nothing too terrible, I assure you. I've just been staying at a friend's, waiting for this knee to improve."

His eyes almost imperceptibly narrowed at her; he couldn't tell if she was lying. There was truth to her words, but he could tell there was also deception in her body language.

He sighed before telling her a piece of information she desperately tried to hide her reaction to, "There were men found in the woods outside of town, killed by kunai."

Again, she waved her hand dismissively and stated, "Oh, I heard about that weeks ago, but I'd already been home for a couple of days. I wonder who could have done it? Anywho, did you need something, Aoshi, or did you only want to interrogate me upon my return home?"

Her cold words shocked him into realizing she would not admit anything to him, and she wanted to be alone. Still…he could let her have her way with this deception, but he couldn't help but annoy her with his continued presence.

Aoshi spoke hesitantly, "I wanted to talk to you, Misao….about our last conversation."

Misao stiffened and started shaking her head at him. She opened her mouth to tell him to leave, but he interrupted her.

"I would like to apologize for my actions." She blinked in shock, not expecting his words.

His hand lifted to brush back his hair in a tell-tale sign that he was nervous but pushing himself for her sake.

"I was being a coward in hiding from you and the others. I did not realize that my absence was affecting you so much, so stuck in grief about what I had done, was I."

Just seeing him so open with her made her heart forgive him. Misao never knew that hearing his apology was just what her heart needed to feel closer to him again.

"I do not fault you for your words, for they have awakened me to how I should live my life within the Aoiya and the Oniwaban. I needed to be reminded that I should contribute my life to a purpose, and that purpose is assisting my Okashira with the new burden she has. Only then will I feel there is a purpose to my still breathing on this earth…" Tears sprung up in Misao's eyes at his acknowledgment of her position in the Oniwaban.

Aoshi trusted her with the responsibility she now carried. He seemed genuinely sorry for how he had treated her the last year he'd been around.

It was only a second before she wrapped her arms around him and softly cried into his chest. This was her first time hugging him since she had welcomed him home after his fight with Shishio.

Aoshi's eyes closed contentedly, and his hand held her head to his chest as she cried out her emotions. With this hug, she told him she loved him. With her hug, Misao said she would wait for him to feel comfortable enough to love her as a man does a woman.

He didn't intend to make her wait long. She would travel a lot, sometimes for weeks, stating she had odd jobs she wasn't ready to tell him about. He let her have this farce, for he already knew what she was doing. After stating she was going away for a weekend, this being the third time in three months, he got curious about where she was going. So, he followed her one day to Hiko's hut in the woods. He knew the man had noticed his presence and silently thanked him for not revealing it to Misao. When he saw her tighten her uniform's obi and slide into a defensive stance, he realized what they were doing.

He had watched for a long while, impressed with how she fought. He had not seen her fight since she was a little girl.

Misao skipped forward in time to when she started planning the murders of the men who'd raped her. She was anxious about saying this part because she knew their reactions would be different from when they knew that she'd killed in self-defense.

-Author's Note-

Hello everyone! I am back. I am so sorry about the wait, and I am working on the next chapter right as I type this.

I thought I had to split this chapter into two because of all the history of Misao I had to go over.

I promise the next chapter won't be all flashback material but will have some interaction between the characters.

As always, thank you for reading, and please be kind in your reviews.