Disclaimers: The original author of RK is Nobuhiro Watsuki (does anyone in this section ignore this, by the way?)

For those who could ask and to close the debate, I am among the people who separate the work of their author. You can get a great message and be yourself a marginal. Many creative geniuses were crazy, and if we crush our environment with the mill of modern Western morality we can clearly remove a large part of our arts and our history books. This being said that I absolutely do not endorse this kind of behavior, and if you have doubts I urge you to read my story until the last chapter, you will probably have the answer to any question you might have about my opinion on such a heart-tearing subject...

I recommend you absolutely the three live action films about Kenshin released these last years (Rurouni Kenshin, Kyoto Inferno, The end of the legend), where the main actor Takeru Sato is doing wonders, and whose music sets and saber scenes choreographies are nearing perfection...

I would like to see more fanfiction about RK, so here is a potentially long story that will show most of the different protagonists of Rurouni Kenshin universe... (a small note anyway, some themes raised here are rather adult so I recommend you to skip this story if you are under 16, provided that I am not wrong with the ranking recommendations of this site of course). I am not a native english writer, so I must ask you to excuse my poor writing (and please tell me if I make any mistake).

Enough of speaking, "on with the fic"!

Chapter 1: The instinct of a father

Year 11 of the Meiji era, 3rd quarter of the Gregorian calendar. Somewhere around Kyoto ...

Hiko Seijuro felt a tremendous pain hit him.

He'd had a bad feeling that evening. The kind of presentiment that binds your guts and paralyzes your spine. The continuity of a strange malaise that had lasted for several months. But since he was certainly not a man to be swayed or depressed, he had gone to practice as always, at that same waterfall where he used to train his only disciple in the past.

Really, what could happen on such a beautiful night...?

Surrounding him, the almost full moon was at its zenith and the soft air of early spring was blowing peacefully. More than anything he enjoyed these nocturnal kata sessions... They were invigorating his body, relieving his mind, releasing his ki. Thinking back with nostalgia at the time when he was not alone on these secluded rocks, he raised his eyes to the star-crossed sky.

It was another, much more tumultuous epoch, in a land where suffering and human desperation were daily bread. Among all, his disciple had one of the most difficult childhoods. From what little he knew, a hard, authoritarian father, who spoke preferably with his fists and pushed his children to exhaustion in the fields, hoping to prepare them for the harsh trials of peasant life. Shinta was too small, too sickly to survive, he had told him. Between looting and epidemics, in those years the sons of the soil had difficulty feeding their families. His mother seemed loving but hardly ever present for the family because of her weak constitution, and he had mentioned brothers and sisters, without expanding on the subject. Probably one of the things his memory had chosen to erase to protect himself. Then the cholera epidemic had struck, ravaging the small mountain village. A sickness born in filth, ruthless, showing his victims literally emptying from the inside before dying of dehydration, most often lying in their own excrement. The young Shinta, miraculously escaped from that bacterial onslaught, was then left alone to dig the grave of his relatives. At six years old. The remaining adults in the village who were too busy saving those still living all the while trying to stop the spreading of the disease had logically no consideration for funeral rites, and sold the orphan to slave traders. It was probably better for him ; the remaining inhabitants could not decently take care of a child too young to work and with whom no one had bond anymore. The epidemic would in the end extinguish the whole hamlet in the following months... But as the dark hours of Bakumatsu were approaching, the slavers were no longer kind souls. They would not bother with mouths to feed unless they certainly earn them money... so a young boy with an effeminate face, eyes and hair with exotic colors, too thin to defend from their adult bodies...

The new apprentice had never talked about this period with Hiko, but he understood what had happened while listening to his nightmares, night after night. He had been tied up, abused, raped as a commodity, just like the women who were transported with him. These things were unfortunately common place at the end of the Edo era. Seijuro had felt a deep anger by realizing the damage done to his young disciple, but railing against people who were already dead by his own hand was a shot in the dark. All this was simply part of the harsh reality of that time. Still, Shinta had buried these people. Against all odds, he had chosen to fight to become stronger, pushed forward by an inexplicable wish to live and help the others. He never had seen a child with so much determination. Pushed to the ground, he would get up, thrown into the water, he would learn to swim, beaten to hell and he would still raise his bokken to protect what he cares about. Such a rage, such a purity, such talent... A perfect blade to be forged by Hiten Mitsurugi school!

Yet he should have known that this fierce child would not stay long at his side. Hiko had been secretly heartbroken when he had seen his pupil throw himself straight into the whirlwind of revolution, making him one of the greatest murderers of his century. At each of the many lives taken, each passer-by who would shake like a leaf at the mere mention of Battosai's dreadful name, Seijuro regretted having taken him under his wing and passed on his precious legacy. And when he had heard of the death of his wife Tomoe by his own hand, his sentence had reached its peak.

Himura Kenshin... shall never cease digging graves ...

Hiko looked lazily around the landscape. The milky way in the sky and the ocher moon, the sound of the waterfall upstream.

...and standing up after all.

He still remembered the day he had unexpectedly come back, ten years later, eyes stricken by fatality... but at the bottom of which still shone that same obstinacy: to help fellow human beings with his body and soul. The renegade student had returned home. Hiko had felt the pride of being his master anew, even though he had never voiced such feelings in his presence. Never would he have dared to hope rebuilding the ghost of a relationship with his former disciple before, but... Although he could not admit it, their destinies had been inexorably linked from the day he had chosen to give a name to this little being with strange blood-colored hair and cerulean gaze...

Emerging from his reminiscences, the aged master methodically resumed his kata. Like an old song, his perfectly coordinated and controlled gestures were slicing through the air with indecent ease. The gracious yet strong moves were melting into the rock and the water of the landscape, allowing the martial choreography to create its own life and sublimate the perfect night scene. Hiko Seijuro, shaped of powerful muscles and sharp mind, was a real force of nature.

...And it is precisely in the midst of this well-known dance that the tremendous pain came to strike him.

The tall man suddenly collapsed to the ground, lifting masses of dried earth in his path, his body pressed by an occult power. An evil of a rare violence was piercing him from one side to the other, brutally removing the air from his lungs, as if... as if he had been stabbed in the chest, right aside his heart.

What on earth is happening?!

He spread his ki with all his might in hope of countering the invisible blow. The pain was nailing him to the ground. He could not breathe anymore. He, the thirteenth master of Hiten Mitsurugi, the undefeated, was overwhelmed by a force he knew nothing about. That's when he was struggling to get up that he had this instinct. This terrible instinct only a father has for his child.

"KENSHIN !"

Somewhere in the veil of darkness, a forgotten soul was in torment.

Unbeknownst to the gaze of living ones and conscience, it dreamt of death as a liberation every night.

Next chapter : Hanami

Take some time to write me a little review to tell me if it's worth it for me to continue, and to reinflate my box of courage! ;+)

(I probably wrote a lot of mistakes, english being not my native langage ; I therefore accept all the criticisms, positive as negative - provided that they are constructive of course -)