Frozen Flare
I.
If Kenshin had been born with a hot temper, everything in his life had squashed it down. He had gotten into scraps with his master from time to time, but given Hiko Seijuro’s temperament, that probably wasn’t very surprising. By the time Kenshin became a hitokiri, he had become cold.
That was part of what had made him so good at what he did.
After what happened with Tomoe, when he was finally leaving the battlefield for good, or so he hoped, Shakku approached him.
“When that sword breaks and you’re still able to believe your own sweet lies . . . come to Kyoto to seek me out.”
And with that cryptic message he departed, leaving Kenshin behind him, for the first time in weeks or months or possibly years, wanting to scream out of sheer frustration.
II.
Sometimes Kenshin was sure that it had all been pointless.
Moments of despair like that were few and far between, but when he was sitting in an inn, quietly enjoying his tea, he sometimes listened to the other people talking. Talking about democracy and revolution and politics. Talking in their cups, most of them. But the fact that they were drunk didn’t change the fact that they didn’t understand any of the things that had gotten them to the Meiji era. It didn’t change the fact that they didn’t want to understand. That in their arrogance and narrow sight, they would plunge the entire country back into the nightmare.
At times like that he had to grip the hilt of the sakabato hard enough for it to dig into his palm, and remind himself over and over and over again that he was no longer a killer.
III.
Once he left the army, Kenshin never seriously considered going back. But from time to time, he heard something that made him angry enough to think about it, if only for a few moments.
The fate of the Sekiho-tai was one of those things.
They had been founded after the first battle of Toba Fushimi, around the same time that Kenshin left the army. Though the public seemed to fully believe the story that they had been spreading lies, Kenshin was smart enough – and had spent enough time around politicians – to recognize that those in charge merely didn’t want to honor the promises that the Sekiho-tai had made on their behalf.
He knew that there was nothing he could do about it, but he knew that if the time ever did come to pick the sword back up, it was something that he would not forget.
IV.
Tomoe had been a traditional Japanese wife.
It wasn’t that Kenshin didn’t know how to cook or do laundry. He had done those in the past. But Tomoe had had very specific ideas about what a wife did and what a husband did, so it had been some time since he had had to practice.
Kenshin was a patient person by nature, and the chores did not bother him. But sometimes while he was waiting for the rice to cook, he would simply be waiting, staring out into space, thinking of nothing in particular, when a sudden sound or smell would hit him and he would be back on the battlefield of the Bakamatsu. Fighting Okita or Saitou or any number of other men. With the thick smell of blood in his nose and the cries and ringing of metal in his ears.
He would jolt back to the present and realize the water had boiled over or the rice had burned, and stare into the fire and wonder why he could not stop thinking about those things. Though he told himself that it would eventually pass as he scraped the burned rice off the bottom of the pot, it was at those moments that he came closest to losing his temper – not at another, but at himself.
V.
Kenshin had always genuinely liked children. It was, perhaps, because he had had so few friends as a child. Whenever he saw a group of children outside playing, he would sit and watch for a while, because it helped ease his spirit. He didn’t even mind playing ‘soldiers’, which was child-language for ‘gang up on and beat the big guy’.
It reminded him of his time in the mountains with Tomoe – not in the heartsore, bittersweet way, but in the remembrance of his discovery of what happiness really was.
So when a man stormed into the group of children and smacked one across his small face, shouting something about chores not being done as the rest of the children fled, it startled Kenshin in a way that destroyed his sense of peace. Despite his better judgment, he walked over as the man was holding the child off the ground by his wrist. “There’s no need for that,” he said.
The man spit in his face. “He’s my son and I can beat him if I want. Stay out of it.”
Kenshin wiped the spit off with his sleeve and watched the man drag his son off by the ear. He had to wait a long time before the dull rage subsided enough to start walking again.
VI.
When Himura Kenshin finally lost his temper, it was quite a sight to see, and it changed his life forever.
Intellectually, he knew that there was no reason what the brutes had done should anger him this badly. He had no reason to feel such fury at their ‘impersonation’ of Hitokiri Battosai. He certainly had no obligation to act out to protect a woman so foolish and naïve that she spoke of swords as though they were some magical healing force.
But the sweet lie she spoke of was the same one he had spoken of to Shakku so many years previous. The sweet lie he still wanted to believe.
So Kenshin lost his temper and put the man who had stained Kamiya Kasshin-ryu in his place, and though he knew he should not have done so, he never regretted it.