Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There are scars on his back that no sword ever made: thick, broken lines like fractured ice. They're pale, long-healed, and stretched across his skin. He had been very young.

Kaoru's hand traces over them, wondering, and he shudders. She stops.

"Kenshin?"

He tightens his grip around her waist. He's lying, shirtless, with his head in her lap. She is clean and warm and welcoming and safe, but even her touch on those scars makes him remember.

"It's nothing," he lies, and she sighs a little, exasperated. So many secrets, she doesn't need to say, and it's not that he wouldn't tell her, if she really wanted to know, but he can never quite bring himself to break this peace with old blood and bad dreams.

She strokes along his spine again, and she's not tracing the old scars anymore but he remembers anyway, and wishes that he could stop.

It had been a hot day, the first time. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd done to anger the slavers; it had been such a long time ago. He might have tried to run away, or done something small and human like bothered them too many times. But it doesn't matter why: what matters is the remembered taste of dust in his mouth as they forced him to the ground and stripped the shirt off his back. What matters is the men's laughter as he fought, snarling, and the explosion of pain in his side when they kicked him. What matters is the whistle of leather through the air and his child's fierce resolve not to scream; the tearing impact that ripped straight through him and the scream that wrenched itself from his throat, bloody and shameful.

He flinches away from her hands, not meaning to, and tries not to make a sound like the child he was. He fails.

The sun beats down, drying the ground, and the air crackles with the static of late summer. There is a dry, sweet smell in the air, of dust and flowers blooming.

She gathers him up, her kimono's silk soothing against hot skin, and he studies the embroidery on her collar as he rests his head on her shoulder. He realizes, abruptly, that she doesn't need to be told. Without words, she understands. His eyes close; he holds her like a child and is not ashamed.

The tree's leaves shield them from the worst of the heat.

A year ago would also have found him stretched out under a tree on a day like this, when the heat made the road shimmer and sent him reeling in search of cool water and shade. Except now there's no need to search: there is respite freely given, and Kaoru's gentle hands.

It's a good change.

Chapter Text

There is a single chink in the wall, no bigger than her littlest finger, and Kaoru's spent the past five cycles of light and darkness huddled against it with her senses straining for any hint of where she is or who brought her here. She isn't sure whether the cycles are night-and-day or something else; sometimes she smells the salt breeze through the crack and thinks it must be natural light, but other times it's lamp-oil and the sulfurous smell of lit matches. She doesn't know, and the crack isn't wide enough to see.

But it lets in a single beam of light, the only light in this black place that smells of mold and excrement and unwashed woman. They've remembered to feed her, but they haven't given her water to wash with or taken away the bucket in the corner.

She's searched for a way out, running her fingers again and again over every inch of the black cell. She's lain in wait and tried to grab the hands that leave her meals. She's dug at the crack until her fingernails broke and bled.

And it's not because she doesn't believe they'll find her. She knows they will, because they always do. He always does. He will never stop searching.

It's just that she doesn't want Kenshin to find her like this. Because he'll blame himself, for not protecting her.

She waits through three more intervals of light and dark, trying to think of something she hasn't tried.

Then she hears something, through the crack. Gunfire. Shouts. Movement. No – not through the crack. From the other side – people, running down the corridor towards the iron door that she could not force or fool into opening. Panicked screams – and other voices, so torn with fury that they barely sound human.

She buries her face in her hands. She doesn't want to see their faces when they find her.

The door is torn off its hinges and she knows who must have done it but she doesn't have time tell Sano to not let Kenshin see because there are arms around her, tight as steel bands, and she is being lifted up and away from the filthy stone floor. She smells blood and sandalwood and terrified rage and she sobs, once, because she couldn't protect him from this.

"It's not your fault," she whispers as he carries her out, eyes still screwed shut. "Don't you dare blame yourself."

Her voice is dry and creaking with lack of use. He stops; his arms grow impossibly tighter around her, bruising, but it's okay because it means that he's here and he's real, and she curls against him as he presses his face to hers, because his hands aren't free right now.

"Please keep your eyes closed, Miss Kaoru," he says in that too-calm voice he only uses when he feels more than he has the words to say. "You've been in the dark for some time, you have, and the light will hurt them."

"Kenshin…" She wraps her hands in his collar. "It's not your fault."

He doesn't say anything else; he just carries her home.

Chapter Text

Yahiko's mother made the best riceballs. Tsubame's are pretty good, and Kenshin makes them with the same easy competence that he does everything else (except seal the deal with Kaoru, but you can't have everything and Yahiko's not exactly in a hurry put up with all that kissy stuff anyway). They're not his mother's, though.

Even after father died, when the riceballs got smaller and smaller, they still tasted the same. He'd always try to leave most of them for her, but the gnawing in his belly just wouldn't go away and she'd urge him to eat, gently, telling him to grow big and strong, telling him about his father and his grandfather and on and on, all the history of his family and the every legend, too. Until he was all aglow with it, and forgot the constant dull ache of hunger. He wouldn't realize that she hadn't eaten until much, much later, when she was asleep, and then he'd curl against her, try not to cry, and swear to do better next time.

He still wondered, sometimes, when the night was very dark and he couldn't hear anyone else breathing, whether she might have survived her illness if he'd just managed to save some for her now and again.

The yakuza had fed him: he'd eaten happily until he realized that the cost of the meals was being added to his debt. After that he'd only take their food as a last resort, if scrounging and stealing had netted him absolutely nothing and he'd reached the point where he had to eat or die. He'd never begged, not ever – he held on to that long after he'd lost everything else – but sometimes a kind person would try to give him something, unprompted, and look at him in a way that made him cringe with shame.

It'd be nice if he could say that he always refused, and sometimes he did, but sometimes he was so consumed with hunger that he'd be halfway through whatever they'd given him before he realized what had happened.

He'd barely touched his food the first time he ate at the dojo, even though he couldn't quite remember the last time he'd had a proper meal. The crazy woman – she hadn't become Kaoru until she'd stood tall and proud before the gang, taking responsibility for the students who'd betrayed her – had frowned, pushing a ricebowl towards him.

"Aren't you hungry, after today?"

"No," he'd said, stomach aching. "I'm fine." No charity, not ever; she was going to be his teacher until he could find a better one but that was all.

Then Kenshin (who had been Kenshin as soon as Yahiko'd learned his name; before that he had just been the strange man who felt like the memories of his father) had quietly put a few more grilled vegetables from the common dish onto his plate.

"You won't become strong if you don't eat well, that you will not," he'd said, in that quiet way he had that Yahiko was trying to learn, now that he was older. And his eyes had held no judgment in them.

Something had loosened inside his chest; a clean, hollow space opened under his heart, like an old wound draining.

"That's right," Kaoru had said firmly, taking a huge bite of her rice. "I won't have any pity if you faint from hunger tomorrow," she'd mumbled around it, then swallowed. "So eat up."

"Like I'd need pity from you," he'd sneered, wolfing down the meal. "I can't believe I'm supposed to learn swordsmanship from a girl – "

"Why, you little – "

And the taste wasn't quite right: nothing would ever be quite right again, because his parents were still dead and that wasn't going to change, but he'd gone to bed that night with a full stomach and dreamed of them smiling.

Chapter Text

Kaoru wishes, sometimes, that her idiot freeloaders would appreciate how hard she works to keep them all fed. She'll never say anything, because she took them in and she wouldn't trade them for all the money in the world – nothing could replace coming home to a house full of voices and life again – but Yahiko and Sano eat enough for four between them, and it's hard sometimes not to break down in tears when they scarf up half her income and then complain about the quality of the food.

Not all the time, mind you. Just sometimes, when she's been sleeping badly. Most of the time she's too tired to dream: she closes her eyes and opens them to the bright dawn and the smell of breakfast, and she never feels alone. But sometimes she can't sleep, because the moon is too bright or someone gave her a sly sideways glance in the market (boy-in-a-kimono, failed kendo teacher, can't catch a man) or another student regretfully stopped their lessons because such things are a luxury now, an indulgence, something to be picked up and dropped as money and time permit and nevermind that she's not sure how she's going to pay the bills. Sometimes for all three reasons at once: bad thoughts and old fears breeding in the middle of the night while she lies in bed with her heart pounding shallow in her chest.

She's always exhausted the next day, short and snappish and barely holding back from actually hurting them – and that only makes her angrier, when she realizes that they really don't take her anger seriously, makes her want to sink a dagger into their most vulnerable spots and twist just so that they'll stop taking her for granted.

Except she doesn't. And she won't. Because they don't, not really, they're just idiot men who don't know any better.

She's just so tired, sometimes.

Kenshin finds her on the porch, leaning against a pillar with her eyes half-closed, and she straightens quickly and hopes that he won't notice the tears burning behind her eyes. She's always careful to hide the worst of it from him, in case he decides that he's a burden, that he should leave. Because as hard as it is sometimes, caring for her boys and for the man she loves so much that it hurts, she knows that it would be even harder without them.

He has a cup of buckwheat tea in one hand and the nutty fragrance makes it hard to pretend that she isn't exhausted. Her father always had a cup in the evenings, to help him sleep: the scent of buckwheat tea means home-safe-family-rest, and she wonders if it's the same for Kenshin or if he only made it because it's too late in the day for green tea.

He holds it out to her, smiling gently, and she can't quite see behind his mask.

She takes it and sips. It's beautifully made – it's really not fair for him to be so good at so many things; if he didn't have terrible handwriting she'd be inclined to think he was some sort of fox-trick conjured from her dreams and worry that she'd wake up lying in a gutter one of these days and realize that everything had been just an illusion.

Kenshin sits down on the porch next to her, not quite touching her, almost too close. He's warm and solid and she wants to curl up against him and go to sleep, but she doesn't because as unusual as their relationship already is (how many tenants would kill to save their landladies? And how many landladies would live to stop them?) she's completely sure that he'd shy and run if he knew how she really felt.

The moon is rising early, before the sun's gone completely below the horizon. It's a pale, almost transparent disk against the darkening blue. Not quite full, not yet: but give it a few more nights.

"Thank you," Kenshin says finally.

"Hmm?" She sips the tea again. It's neither sweet nor bitter: somewhere in the middle, soothing, like soil moistened by rain and warmed in the sun. "What for?"

He shrugs a little and smiles one of his real smiles, the small one he uses when he sees how the joke's on him. His gesture encompasses the yard and the training hall and the bathhouse; kitchen and bedrooms and dining room and fence and the sadly neglected vegetable garden he's trying to revive. It's badly overgrown, but he's making progress: she can see clean earth peering through, ready to be planted as soon as the weeds are out of the way.

"Oh." She can't help the small laugh. "Don't worry about it. It's nothing."

"…it's not."

He looks at her when he says it, uncommonly serious, and she smiles without quite knowing why. Then, carefully – because something in his eyes tells her it's alright – she rests her head on his shoulder. He's as warm up close as he feels from a distance, and his arm doesn't come around her waist but that's okay; this is far enough, for now.

"Thank you," he says again.

"You're welcome," she tells him, simply, and means it.

She dozes off at some point and wakes the next morning in her own bed, carefully tucked in and still wearing her kimono, and isn't tired at all.

Chapter Text

Kaoru sneezed.

Then she sneezed again, sniffling, and rubbed her nose. It didn't do much: she'd been sneezing so hard that it was red and sore and really, the rubbing was only making things worse in the long run. She flopped back down on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling; however, her sinuses were congested enough that she soon had to roll on her side, coughing in deep, unladylike barks that made her chest ache.

Stupid cold. Stupid autumn. Stupid autumn cold.

The door slid open and she stared morosely at Kenshin's feet, too miserable to do more than mumble a greeting and burrow deeper under the blankets as a draft wafted in from the hall. He shut the door quickly behind him, padding carefully over to kneel at her side.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"No," she groused. "I hate being sick."

He put a hand on her forehead, testing her temperature. "Did you finish the medicinal tea?"

"Yes." She started to sit up. He put down the bowl of hot water that he had carried in and eased her back down.

"You shouldn't strain yourself, that you should not," he said, immersing a washcloth in the bowl and wringing it out. The water was steaming gently, and smelled of something sharp and clear. "Here. One thought this might help with the headache, and perhaps the congestion, that I did."

She twisted her fingers in the sheet as he laid the compress on her forehead. The warmth made her skin tingle and relax, and the scent was somehow soothing. Or maybe it was just his proximity; he was sitting very close to her, and as he adjusted the compress he brushed along her hairline in a probably-accidental caress.

"Is that better?"

She made an affirmative noise, wishing she was brave enough to hold his hand. Things had been strange between them in the month since her return from Enishi's island. He was as solicitous as ever – more so, really – but there was a sense of waiting, of water drawing back to break against the shore. As though he was preparing himself for something.

"Is there anything else one can do?" he asked her, and his eyes were glowing with something she wanted to name but was too afraid to, in case she was wrong. Although she didn't see how she could be. But still…

"Um." She flushed a little, and told herself it was just the fever. "No… except…"

He inclined his head towards her, bangs falling around his face like crimson silk. She swallowed, not quite able to look him in the eyes anymore.

"Would you stay with me? It's just – it's really boring, being sick."

And that wasn't the question she wanted to ask, but it was close enough. Kenshin laughed, small and rueful.

"Ah." He reached out to adjust the washcloth again, and this time the brush of his hand was longer and more deliberate, drawing his fingers through a few stray strands of her hair. "Yes, Miss Kaoru."

And he stayed.

Chapter Text

The first time Kaoru kissed him came as a complete and utter surprise.

Kenshin had been standing in the yard, contemplating the grocery list, when she'd marched up with a determined snap in her lovely blue eyes and he'd braced himself for the onslaught. It was probably Yahiko's fault; once the dust had settled and he'd stopped tiptoing around as though he was afraid Kaoru would vanish again, he'd started bragging about his mastery of the Kasshin ougi. The subject was rapidly becoming sorer than that of her cooking skills, and hardly a day went by without Kaoru stalking over in high dudgeon and ranting about her student's newfound arrogance.

Not that he minded. He never had, and he never would, now, because she was here to be infuriated, to snarl and roll up her sleeves and chase them around the house over some joking slight, and that was his world in motion. Her eyes, her voice, the trailing scent of her hair… without her, things had simply stopped. And they hadn't truly started again until he'd fallen in her arms on the beach, until he'd woken that first morning back with his heart in his throat and reached to brush the edge of her soul, until he'd felt her spirit reaching back and known that she was there: home and safe and unhurt, and it had only been a nightmare after all.

"Miss Kaoru…" he said now, raising his hands to placate her. "Now, now, there's no need to – mmph!"

She grabbed him around the head, fingers tangling in his hair as she yanked him across the few inches between them and pressed her lips over his, soft and slightly chapped with the autumn chill. He flailed, unbalanced, and she let him go.

"There," she said, a slightly nervous look in her eyes. "That's done, then."

"O…oro?" Kenshin stared at her, heat flooding his face, and tried to say something more coherent. "…oro?"

So much for that.

She crossed her arms and turned aside, raising her proud chin. "I promised myself I'd do that when I got home," she explained, "and now it's done. So there."

She started to walk away.

He lunged after her, caught her sleeve between his fingers.

"Wait – "

She looked back.

Their first kiss had been a surprise; their second kiss was clumsy and uncertain, all fumbling hands and bewildered mouths. The third was a little more practiced, and the fourth and fifth were wonderful: his hands tight around her waist and her arms around his neck, and she was all softness and heat against him. After their sixth kiss, she asked him to marry her.

After their seventh, he said yes.

Chapter Text

The girl was back. She'd brought friends: a tall, spikey-haired fellow and an elegant woman with nobility's arrogant look. They were arguing with the guards about something, but he couldn't quite hear them over the buzz of blood in his ears.

His lungs were starting to fail him. It wouldn't be long, now. He wondered what would take him first: the thirst, or the lack of breath as his raised arms squeezed his chest?

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wood. They hadn't broken his legs, which was no kindness. It only made the dying slower.

Most of his audience had come once, stared for a long time, and never returned. The girl came by every day, more than once but only briefly, as if she was checking on his progress. As if she didn't want to miss the moment of his death.

He wondered who of hers he'd killed. She was young, so probably not her husband. An older brother, maybe, or a father.

There was a sharp pain in his chest and he choked, trying to draw breath and failing. Drowning on dry land.

Ah. Not the thirst, then.

He let himself fall.

And then he was falling – no, sliding – the relentless pressure holding him in place was gone and he gasped reflexively. Air rushed into his lungs and it hurt so damn much that he almost wished he was back on the cross. He was on the ground, suddenly, and there was noise and motion and a woman's voice snapping instructions, low and angry. Firm hands were probing him, competent and gentle, and something cool and soothing was smeared across the rope burns on his wrists and ankles.

He forced his eyes open.

The girl was kneeling over him. Her eyes were blue, brilliantly so: blue as butterflies, blue as gemstones, blue as birdfeathers. She lifted his head, gently, and held a waterskin to his mouth

"It's alright," she said softly. "Just go slowly."

There was water against his lips and he gulped it in reflexively. She took the skin away before he was anywhere near done.

"Swallow," she chided. He did. Then she brought it back. He remembered to go slowly this time.

Eventually the waterskin was empty. She set it aside and took out a handkerchief, wiping at some of what had spilled down his chin despite his best efforts. He leaned into her touch despite himself; it had been so long since he'd known gentleness.

"…why?" he asked, dreading the answer.

She seemed to freeze. Her gem-blue eyes closed, and the world seemed a little dimmer for it.

"…Father would never have wanted this," she said finally, voice cracking with unshed tears.

He closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"Rest," she said, as if she hadn't heard him.