Disclaimer: Can I has Kenshinburger? No, no I can't has Kenshinburger. D: Watsuki-sama can, though.
Ghost Story
by misaoshiru
About a month after her mother's death, she starts seeing it. It is not what she thought a ghost would look like – really, it is more of a vague shadow, with no discernible form – but she knows. She sees it in the garden sometimes, sitting in her mother's favorite place in the shade, perhaps arranging invisible flowers. It never speaks to her, but there is a time or two when she swears she hears it singing to her in the wind, lullabies with no words or meaning. She also sees it passing between the pantry and the kitchen with a grace that belonged only to her mother and sitting in the dining area, across the table from her father. She knows he does not see it. Only she can.
And she feels guilty, for she knows she is not the daughter that her mother would have wanted. She cannot care for the baby the way she knows, by instinct, her mother did for her. She cannot cook as well, nor clean, nor sew. She is only a little girl half-longing to grow up and take her mother's place in the household, and the other half wanting her mother back so that everything would be the way it was before. When she sees her mother's shadow, she starts, standing straighter, sweeping with more care, trying not to fidget as she sits in place. She sees the shadow and wants to be more like her mother was, and over the years, she grows to move with more grace, greater poise; she learns to cook, to clean, to sew, to care for a child...she even takes on her mother's impassive mask. Her mother would be pleased, she thinks, but the shadow remains.
"Sister! Why were you staring off into space?"
"Eh? Oh, it's nothing. Please, do not worry about it."
She starts to see the second shadow after he dies, in all the places he would go in life. He is at the riverbank, where he used to fish, or sitting on the veranda of her house, waiting for her. Sometimes, she sees him leaving again, and she has to fight to maintain her mask. It would not do to cry in public. Her mother would have been scandalized.
The Edo air has become oppressively heavy, in her mind. She cannot handle the sight of the shadows, day after day. She has to escape these ghosts, has to appease them.
She follows her fiancé's shadow to Kyoto.
It seems that for all his life, he has been able to see them. First his family, then the girls who tried to protect him and the bandits who had attacked. There were shadows wherever he went.
Kyoto is soon filled with them, in his mind, by his own blade. They are everywhere he turns, threatening to drag him back to Hell with them. He pays them no mind; he cannot, to survive. In a terrible way, it is appropriate that he is an assassin of shadows. Their presence conceals him in the night, even as they slowly eat away at his soul, his sanity. His life.
She sees the bloody rain. (He makes it fall.) She sees (he sees) the shadows in his (her) eyes and realizes, to her dismay (to his astonishment), that they are the same. They can both see.
They are not alone.
The shadows are still there. Still haunting them.
But they are no longer a threat, no longer bothersome. Some of them are even almost pleasant.
Now that he and she are together, united they stand.
And then she is gone, like a blossom blown away by the last squall of winter. He is alone again.
But she is still there. She will always be there, by his side. His sheath. His sanity.
His shadow.
"...Do you believe in ghosts?"
Kaoru looks up at him, perplexed. "Huh? Not really. Why?"
"No reason."