Kendo no Go
In the Language of Kendo:
A Fanfic in 100 Chapters
by Akai Kitsune
77: Headache
~*~
Kaoru seemed
to have a perpetual headache, sometimes.
She would lie awake on her
futon, all morning, all day, depending on the severity of the dull pain in her
head, listening to the domestic noises around her. There was Kenshin, bustling
about quietly in the kitchen, his feet near-silent pads across the floor like
those of a cat. Kenji was at his side, helping, or trying to, constantly asking
questions, often calling for kaasan until he was hushed by Kenshin's
gentle intones. Yahiko was outside, shouting for her, followed by the group of
young students who had drifted to the dojo in the past year or so, until they
discovered her condition. Then her first apprentice would burst into complaints
about having to practice alone because the "old hag" was sick.
'Kids,' she
thought crossly, crumpling a blanket and stuffing it over her ears, 'Why on
earth to we have all these kids?!'
It was, surely, a thought which
crossed the mind of a mother at least once in a lifetime.
Wasn't it?
Of course not all the
children were hers - she was fully responsible for only one, now that Yahiko was
old enough to care for himself - but sometimes they made her so weary of
everything.
The pounding in her head
certainly didn't help in the slightest.
Kenshin
never seemed to get sick. He was always to healthy, so infuriatingly perfect,
dashing around, keeping her house in working order while she lay in bed
hearing nothing but the hammering in her skull.
Of course he did get
sick, sometimes, but he hid it from her every time, waving it aside, ignoring
his own limits - unless Kenji was threatened, in which case he shut himself away
until the illness passed. But he never stopped working, never stopped moving.
Kaoru envied that.
At times she wished she could
be like Kenshin. Kenshin, who never got sick or had headaches, who never lay
awake on the futon with the blankets pressed against his aching ears, who only
bled, bled across the ground just like her heart bled for him, to him, from him.
'I wish...'
~*~
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