No, Rurouni
Kenshin and the characters from this manga/anime are not mine.
Well, this
is my new experiment.
KLEENEX
ALERT!!!
THIS IS
FULL OF SEISOU HEN SPOILERS, SO NOW YOU ARE WARNED; LEAVE IT NOW IF YOU DON'T
WANT TO KNOW, AND IF YOU DON'T WANT TO CRY.
I want to
express my gratitude to Mara who has been helping me with this a lot.
One more
thing: I'm not a native English speaker, so if I do any speeling mistake, please,
help me without flaming me. Thanks a lot.
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Hokkaido
Prefecture, 3 San Gatsu, Meiji 28 (March 3, 1895)
The report
was lying on his desk again as it had already been, one month ago, so neatly
written that the cold facts poured through it with the usual efficiency he was
pleased with. He took it and went over its pages once more.
This time,
however, there was a story behind those facts.
A story he
knew, at least a part of it.
Barely one month
ago he was reading one of those reports, a boring task he loathed but he knew
he had to perform it in order to fulfill his bureaucratic duties.
There,
among all these anonymous names and cases that he was revising as usual, one
caught his attention.
A long lost
and wanted criminal had been found.
Alone.
Dead.
It was
ironic, he thought smirking.
He was the
eldest of them.
Yet he had
survived longer than his two old adversaries.
He puffed
out a small cloud of smoke from the corner of his thin lips.
They had
survived wars and atrocities, enemies and even a bloody past haunting them,
calling for their lives.
But they
couldn't survive the peace of the Meiji-era.
Short after
reading the report the first time, he received a letter.
In company
of the letter, the little parcel with the diaries came
His hand
touched briefly the first book lying on the desk. These frail pages recorded
eleven years of the life of that man, one of his old adversaries.
They were carefully
protected, enveloped in a thin layer of white silk.
White.
The color
of snow.
The color
of mourning.
He was
asked to perform a task in the name of honor. The last wish of a dead man.
Surely he
would do it.
But as a
researcher on criminal thought he would first study those gems.
A trip into
a tortured man's mind, a bloody, reckless murderer.
It was
priceless.
An enemy.
Now gone, a
mere ghost, a shadow from the past, a past of which he himself was a main
character and now he was nothing more than a pathetic bureaucrat sitting behind
a desk
Well, not
quite, actually.
An evil
smirk crossed his sharp features.
Slowly,
carefully, enjoying the moment, he lightened another cigarette,
sat down
behind his desk and took the first volume in his hands.
The subtle
scent of white plums filled the room when he opened it, his glance falling on
the name on the first page. The name of a man he knew as a merciless murderer
and respected as a skilled enemy.
Excited he leaned
forward, starting a promising journey into the mind and the past of another
man, so different from himself