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Heart, Sword, and Song: Chapter 2 - Loving You

by JaneDrew

On some level, she knew that it was absurd to try to divine the future through radish plants, as if they were tea leaves she could peer at to make out shapes of things to come.

Not that she was sure she wanted to know what was to come.

Still, something in Tomoe's heart had clenched at the sight of the way the plants were suffering at the excess rain. 'Like tears,' she thought to herself, 'As if they were overwhelmed by sorrow...'

Kenshin had heard the emotion in her voice as she had run her hands over the leaves. "I tried," she had said, feeling as if her voice would break, "I tried so hard...." He had not understood that she was talking about so much more than the radishes.

Loving you

Is not a choice

It's who I am

He was out in the small field next to the house now, trying his best to salvage what he could of their crop.

'My husband.' she thought. Not the man she had loved for so long; not the man she had expected. This boy, with his bright red hair falling haphazardly across his face, who had shyly offered to grow radishes for her, because she had worried that the meals she prepared for them both were inadequate. This man, with burning amber eyes, who had held a sword to her throat and grabbed her wrist with bruising force, because she had tried to give him her shawl to make his sleep easier.

Loving you

Is not a choice

And not much reason to rejoice

No, not what she had expected at all. She had wanted to hate him; she had hated him, so fiercely that it had pierced through her grief like a blade and sent her on the long road to Kyoto. Long months later, she found herself here in Otsu, living as the wife of a young man who was not in fact an apothecary or a farmer. She suspected that it was mostly for her sake rather than for the sake of their disguise that he was trying so hard to be both. She knew that he was changing, could see it in the way his eyes were softening and his hands were no longer constantly searching for the sword he now put aside during the day.

'And someday, maybe, you will not feel the need to keep that sword with you at night,' Tomoe reflected. Katsura had requested that she be with Kenshin as a sheath against the madness of being a hitokiri, that she help to prevent his soul from being destroyed by the work he had chosen to do. Even before then, she had sought to understand the young man who had carried a stranger home with him in spite of her having witnessed the bloodshed he was capable of.

But...

It gives me purpose

It gives me voice

To say to the world

This is why I live

You are why I live

He had tried to send her away in Kyoto, returning her dagger to her and telling her that she should find someplace safe for herself. The sarcasm in her reply had caused his eyes to widen, and in his startled response she had gotten her first glimpse of the man inside of the hitokiri who had slain her fiance. In retrospect, it was that moment that had started her on the path to where she now was.

His repeated efforts to keep her away from him, his declaration that her kindness would be better spent on someone other than him, someone who did not smell of blood... all of those things had convinced her that he was more than merely a hitokiri, as much as he might not believe it himself. She had been surprised, and more than a little distressed, to find herself not only wanting to understand him, but to help him, to heal the soul-deep wounds that he was causing himself every time he carried out another assignment in the name of making the world a better place.

Loving you

Is why I do

The things I do

Loving you

Is not in my control

As Tomoe looked out to where he was working in the fields, his brow furrowed in concentration, his hair shining in the sunlight, she was almost overwhelmed by an impulse to go to him and demand, 'Do you understand, can you understand, that there is more to you than your sword?

She had never asked Kenshin what had made him so desparate to save the world that it had led him to believe that he could only change it through his sword, to see being a hitokiri as the only option available to him. She wanted to, but could never find the words, and she was unsure if he would ever open up to her enough to raise the subject on his own.

But loving you

I have a goal

For what's left of my life...

I will live

And I would die for you

And what could she offer to him in return for his secrets? How would he feel about her if he knew the truth behind her actions? She had lost Akira because she had been unable to speak her true heart to him; she knew that she could not take that risk again. The pact which she had made to destroy Kenshin haunted her, more even than the memory of Akira's death. She was resolved to protect him, beyond her promise to be a sheath for him; she knew that she would act without hesitation to save him, no matter what the cost to herself.

'My husband...' she thought to herself again.

The one who bought her a mirror their first day in Otsu, and who had given it to her with a kind of proud self-consciousness, wanting so much for her to like it, quite possibly the first present he had ever given to a woman in his young life, his unvoiced desire to see her happy reflecting in his eyes as he gave her the extravagent gift.

For now I'm seeing love

Like love I've never known

A love as pure as breath

As permanent as death

Implacable as stone

The one whose consuming compassion for those who suffered in the chaos of this world had led him to blood-soaked streets, and to brutally cutting down another man who was gentle, and kind, and who had only wanted to make her happy.

A love that, like a knife,

Has cut into a life

I wanted left alone

Tomoe looked down at the journal she was writing in and sighed. She couldn't remember when she had fallen in love with Akira; he had always been there, since their childhood together. His feelings for her had been marked by tenderness and understanding; it had been a love which made her feel cherished and safe, something that had been a sanctuary for her. After his death, she had felt nothing but hollowness, and she had retreated behind the walls of her own pain. She had neither wanted nor expected anything else, but now...

A love I may regret

But one I can't forget

Now there was Kenshin, whose face held the scar inflicted by her fiance as he desparately sought to return to her, whose heart was even more scarred through the uses he had put his own sword to.

I don't know how I let you

So far inside my mind

But there you are

And there you will stay

How could I ever wish you away?

I see now I was blind...

She knew in her heart that their time in Otsu was merely a temporary respite, that someday Katsura would send for Kenshin and he would go back to his work as a hitokiri. Was it selfish of her, she wondered, to hope that that day was a long way off? And what would she do if that day came, if Kenshin once again spent his days waiting for black envelopes and his nights causing a rain of blood in the streets of Kyoto?

And should you die tomorrow

Another thing I see

Your love will live in me

What would she do if she lost him to that? What would she do if she lost him to....

Tomoe put her brush down. What was normally a calming activity, one she could turn to to make sense of her own thoughts, was not helping her today. Her feelings for Kenshin were tangled with her own guilt, with her fear that speaking out would destroy what they had, with her fear that staying silent would destroy him....

And she was not sure she could live with it if she destroyed him, not when she already knew that she could have saved the first man she had loved by speaking out.

"Anata," she sighed to herself, "Even if I can save you from yourself, how can I save you from me?"

Loving you...

Is not a choice

It's who I am....