Tomoe: Do you find it easy or difficult to trust others?
I trust far too easily. I like everyone at first, because I am firmly a “benefit of the doubt” person. I’m open about most personal details. Now, do I trust them with innermost thought? No. But you have to really screw up to loose my trust that you’re a decent person.
Souzou: Does anyone look up to you?
Well, yeah, a few. I have kids, so the fact that I know what 10x100 equals gets me genius status. And I’m a senior nurse in my profession (sadly, turnover and burn out is so high in my country that anything more than about 7 years experience is considered ‘senior’). So, generally, at work I am seen as a resource/mentor type person. I also tutor nursing students. (I hope that doesn’t sound overly arrogant! I’m proud to be good at my job, and have been a nurse for about 14 years. I work hard at it, and I enjoy the teaching and helping role.)
tinklefish replied to your post “scifikimmi replied to your photoset “saranghaekoreandramas: We all...”
i've been seeing this angst pop up on my dash, may or may not have to give in.......
Listen dude, I actually haven’t finished it?? I’ma tag @syolen and @kakikaeru, both the reasons I started it AND why I’m staying FAR AWAY from the conclusion.
1. First impression: That you are very cool. too cool for me probably.2. Truth is: I wish we chatted more3. How old do you look: idk i’m bad at judging ages. based on ur avatar? like mid twenties?4. Have you ever made me laugh: yeah im sure at some point!5. Have you ever made me mad: not that i can remember!6. Best feature: ummm u r sassy. go sass.7. Have I ever had a crush on you: noooooope :P8. You’re my: tumblr friend? idk9. Name in my phone: u rnt in my phone but if u were u would be TF cus duh.10. Should you post this too? *shrug* do what u want fam
Hello, @tinklefish- and apologizing for being a VERY BELATED Rurouni Kenshin Secret Santa (erm... as @animaniacal , our esteemed moderator/herder of cats may have mentioned, this year’s Christmas had more nasty 24-hour viruses than would be ideal...).
Anyway, rather than making you wait any longer, here is Part One (Part Two will be completed by the end of the week)!
Title: All I (Didn’t Know I) Want For Christmas
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2424
Prologue: A Christmas Kaoru
Kenshin was dead to begin with. Kaoru had no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by two officials, a clerk, the undertaker, and a set of mourners who had been paid for, in full, by a government agency whose name was blurry enough to be just this side of unreadable.
Sighing, she put the papers down, turned to the tall man next to her and said, “I still think that this is an incredibly stupid idea, Sano.”
“Oh, come on, Missy-- it’s a great idea!”
From the chair where he sat scowling in the corner, Yahiko snorted. Kaoru’s glare had no impact on the sullen teen, but at least he didn’t say any of the things he was thinking. If you could win an award for resentful snacking, though, he would have been in the top ten.
Kaoru had a lot of things that she could have said, too. For example, “How drunk did you have to be to come up with this plan?” or “On a scale of one to ‘entire city catches fire, burns down, and then sinks into a swamp’ just how awful were the plans you rejected?”
However, since she didn’t have any better plans, she just took a deep breath and said, “Right. How exactly is this supposed to work?”
Sano, whose had clearly been gearing up for more of a fight, managed not to choke on his beer. Putting it down on the table so that both hands were free for emphatic gestures, he said, “Okay- the way I figure it, you’ve got two problems right now. Well, two big problems, anyway. First,” he said, holding up a finger, “you’ve got to get rid of that idiot who wants your house. Second, you’ve got to make sure that no other idiots get the same idea. If we… hey!”
“Yahiko, throwing apple cores at Sano isn’t going to fix things.”
“Whatever.”
Kaoru couldn’t really blame her apprentice for his attitude. The past week had been difficult for everybody, and until Sano had strode in that morning with a handful of papers and a determined expression, she had barely had the energy to get dressed and try to cook breakfast.
“Sorry, Sano. He’s… I mean, ever since… well. You know.”
“S’okay, Missy- I know.” Sano looked surprisingly serious for a minute, before he coughed, shook himself, and went back to explaining his big idea.
“As I was saying, you’ve got two big problems. First, that pipsqueak Hiruma bastard who’s telling everybody that you married his brother back during the war.”
All three of them paused to shudder. Kihei Hiruma had first started skulking around the neighborhood a month ago, but it was only in the past week that he’d approached Kaoru. She had to admit, he’d been clever- rather than come talk to her alone and get laughed out of the house, he’d staged a dramatic scene in the neighborhood market, complete with all sorts of talk about how she would “be safe now that he was there,” and how “he wouldn’t leave his poor dead brother’s defenseless widow alone in this cruel, cruel world.” By the time he was done, his fingers curling harshly into her shoulder, fake tears in his eyes, her neighbors were practically applauding.
Based on what Yahiko had heard from Tae and Tsubame, the man had been spending all his nights in the local bars and restaurants, talking about how he had come to the city to find the woman his brother had married so that he could do his duty as a loyal brother. His investigations mostly consisted of collecting information about local single women who had property and no family.
Kaoru was pretty sure that the reason she ended up at the top of the list was because her father had refused to let the war interfere with her education. Some schools had been off the list, of course, but she hadn’t minded. After her father died, she had tried her best to put her grief aside and get the degree that he’d sacrificed so much for.
She didn’t regret it- had done her best never to regret having missed so much time with her father- but at the moment, having been out of town for several years where nobody local could check up on her, was proving to be very inconvenient.
“The thing is-- hey, are you listening?”
“Yes, Sano.”
Yahiko stood up and stretched. “I still don’t get why Kaoru can’t just tell everybody the freakin’ truth.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do FOR THE PAST WEEK?!?”
“The thing is, every time she’s tried to say that she didn’t secretly elope with his brother, that jerk just looks sad and starts talking about how he at least would have welcomed her into their family, regardless of what her father would have-” Sano held up his hands. “I’m not sayin’ anything against your father, Missy, just repeating what Hiruma’s been spreading around. And he’s good at it, too.”
“I still don’t get what he wants.”
Kaoru exhaled. “This morning the lady who runs the organic store asked me when he was going to be moving in to help me look after the house and run the school- or if I was going to sell everything and go back to his family’s estate.”
Yahiko’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline as he gaped at her. “You can’t do that! I mean, he can’t do that! I mean, how could anybody be dumb enough to believe that….”
Sano interrupted Yahiko mid-sputter. “Look, kid, we all know that Kaoru isn’t the secret marriage type, but that guy’s making it sound all romantic and stuff. Which means that there’s only one way out of this mess.”
Sano picked up the papers that Kaoru had put down earlier and waved them with a dramatic flourish.
“Introducing your new husband, Mr. Kenshin Himura!”
“Wait, the dead guy?” Yahiko asked skeptically.
Kaoru couldn’t blame him; when Sano had talked to her the day before, she’d almost thrown him out on his very spiky hairdo.
Then he’d told her that one of his sort-of-reputable friends had heard from an even less-reputable friend that Kihei Hiruma had been trying to hire somebody to forge a marriage license and wedding registration.
“Hey, at least our dead guy doesn’t come with annoying relatives who want to steal Kaoru’s land and dump her dead body in a ditch.”
“Hey!”
“What?”
“Sano, can we please not assume that… okay, fine, yes, Kihei is exactly the kind of guy who wants to steal my land and then dump my corpse in the nearest ditch.”
“And he’s not going to give up, as long as he thinks he has a shot at this whole “you secretly married my brother, so give me all your stuff” thing.” Yahiko sighed. “So, how’d you make up a fake husband?”
Sano looked offended at the suggestion. “I did not make anybody up- I blackmailed Katsu into hacking the records and… look, the only thing that matters is that this Himura character was a real person, who is really dead. All we need to to is get our fake marriage documents together first!”
Kaoru took a deep breath. It wasn’t like a pretend husband was going to change anything, right? Especially a dead one.
“Okay, Sano- how exactly am I going to explain why I have never mentioned my beloved husband, Kenshin… what was it?”
“Kenshin Himura- and don’t worry! I’ve got it all figured out.”
****************************
Chapter One : I Wonder As I Wander
Kenshin Himura looked at the scrap of paper that was supposed to direct him to his new lodgings and frowned.
“You know your handwriting is bad when even you can’t read what you wrote,” he thought, annoyed.
The last time he’d been to the city, he’d learned some of the layout, but that had been years ago. Not to mention the fact that it looked very different during the daytime, with bright holiday lights festooning every shopfront and snow falling softly. It looked happy, and peaceful.
His thoughts went back to another winter, years ago, one that had started out with an unexpected peacefulness, only to end in blood-stained snow and….
Shaking off the past, he put the paper back in his pocket and headed for the nearest coffee shop. This was supposed to be a fresh start, or at least a break from his travels.
“Coffee, lodging, and figuring out the next step,” he told himself firmly.
The coffee shop that he selected had large windows that looked out on the main square, where a lively outdoor market was filled with the sights and sounds of the season. In addition to the coffee, he let the cheerful barista talk him into getting something that looked like a cross between a cinnamon roll and an oversized muffin and took a seat at a booth where he had a good view out onto the square.
Then he tried to convince himself that he chose his seat so that he would have a peaceful scene to look at, rather than one where his shoulders wouldn’t tense up because he was sitting with his back to a door.
Kenshin sighed. After almost ten years of wandering, you would think that he would have… well, not gotten over everything, but at least been able to not expect an attack at every moment. He could almost hear his former master’s sarcastic remarks.
“What did you expect, idiot? You can’t stain your hands with blood and expect that your soul won’t get tarnished.”
Taking a long sip of his coffee helped drown out the sarcastic voice, but didn’t get rid of it completely. Kenshin was fairly sure that nothing would get rid of it completely. On the other hand, he could think of worse mental companions to have while wandering across the countryside, trying to decide what he thought about the new world he’d been so instrumental in creating.
It had taken him years to sort through the tangled mess of emotions he’d been left with at the end of the war- the guilt at everything he’d done, the pride in the cause he’d worked so hard for, the constant internal whisper of was it worth it, was it worth it, was it worth it?, the sense of being torn in two every time he saw injustice when he’d done so much to ensure a world where everything would be a teenage boy’s idea of fair….
Kenshin took a deep breath. He was here, now; the coffee was good, the muffin-cinnamon roll thing was reasonably fresh, and the entire reason he was in the city was to move forward. As soon as he figured out what “forward” was.
He knew that if he went to any of his old comrades they would be willing- even eager- to find him a job. Of course, the kind of jobs that they would want him to take would either involve doing things he had sworn never to do again when he put down his weapons, or they would involve using his past to intimidate people- and he really didn’t want to get paid to stand in the background and glower while other people played political games. Even if he was promised a government job that involved no glaring and no violence, he knew enough about politics to know that some promises would go out the window the minute anything important enough came up- and that the definition of “important” pretty much translated to “whenever the top guys want something badly enough.”
There were lots of reasons why he’d stayed on the move and off of the government’s radar in the years after he’d called in every favor he could think of so that he could vanish without being pursued, and not all of them had to do with his own mental state.
So. Official jobs were out. The kinds of temporary jobs he’d taken on while wandering were… well, not “out,” but not ideal. Maybe people like him didn’t get a happy ending, but was it too much to hope for something like peace? A place that he could call his own, and people that he could have in his life for more than a few brief weeks before moving on?
After collecting his dishes from the table and bringing them to the designated area, Kenshin took a minute to consult with the barista about the address he’d scribbled down. She was too polite to remark on his handwriting, but did blink several times before she got a map out so that they could try to match what he’d written down with the name of a street. Once they’d gotten it narrowed down to two possibilities, he thanked her for her time and wrote down both options. Two choices was a good start, and he could hardly justify keeping the woman from her job any longer.
As he exited the coffee shop, Kenshin reminded himself that he wasn’t going to find his answers immediately.
After all, it wasn’t as if a solution to his problems was just going to fall into his lap.
The market was busy, and noisy, in a way that he would have found nerve-wracking twelve years ago, and which he still struggled to find relaxing even now. Fortunately, his instincts were well-honed enough to sort through and categorize the noises, enabling his subconscious to determine that nothing out there was an actual threat.
“Children playing, child arguing with her brother about sharing the gingerbread, running footsteps, man and woman haggling over prices, running footst---”
“Darling! There you are!”
Kenshin had barely started turning towards the approaching sound of footsteps when he was suddenly tackled, only managing to keep his feet through years of training.
He had a moment to register blue eyes, long dark hair, and a determined expression when he found himself being thoroughly kissed, slim fingers winding through his hair to pull him closer.
Heat spread through him, and he found it hard to focus on anything except the sensation of her lips soft against his, her hands against his skin. His arms automatically pulled her closer, and the feeling of her curves up against him made him gasp slightly. The woman in his arms took advantage of his shock to deepen their kiss, touching her tounge to his. He thought that she made a noise, but was too caught up in the fire racing through his veins to really pay much attention.
