(  ) enclose thoughts, * * for emphasis, [ ] indicate "mindspeech"


Starlight, Hellfire
Part 1: What Brings the Wind
By MiaViolet

	The sun was setting.
	Kenshin stood contemplating its fiery beauty for a time as he stood by a
gnarled tree near the dojo grounds, watching the golden crocus that was the
sun fold its petals and sink deep into the horizon. The sun's dying rays shone
full on his face, outlining his delicate features in gold and tinting his eyes
with amber. 
	It had been years since he had stood like that, on a hill with the sunset
before him, golden eyes watching its splendor. But then, years ago, he had
watched the sun with no more than a killer's indifference for beauty and the
hunter's need to know time, and the gold in his eyes then was not just a
reflection of the sun's rays but a mirror of the person he was. A mirror of
the killer he was then.
	Kenshin closed his eyes momentarily, remembering the suffering, the anguish,
the screams, reliving once again the tangy smell of blood in the air and the
blackness of death that was his world more than a decade ago and the stuff of
his nightmares even until now. The mark of pain and guilt, patiently endured,
was clearly written in the somber expression of his violet eyes. They were
eyes that were far too old for a young man, far too wise for one who had lived
for but twenty-eight years in the world.
	A breeze whispered past, ruffling the rurouni's hair like streaming red silk,
causing the swaying trees to sigh their age-old song of sorrow and mourn over
the tragedy a man could make of his life by refusing forgiveness when it was
what he needed most.
	The rhythmic murmuring of the trees was broken by a shrill scream that
shattered the tranquility of the moment and caused Kenshin to look up from his
reverie with trouble in his eyes. Instinctively, his hand reached for his
sakabatou in a swift gesture honed to perfection by years of use.
	Seconds later, he was gone from the old tree's side, with the wind sighing in
his wake.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
	A young woman ran along the riverbank, her hair flying behind her like a
living thing lashing around her shoulders in fear. Despite the restriction of
the travel-stained kimono she wore, she ran quickly, as one who has been
running all her life and has been borne on the wings of fear all that time.
She staggered on, her breath hoarse and burning in her throat, urged on by the
thought of capture by her pursuer. Her footfalls sounded very loud to her
ears, thudding rhythmic patterns in the green turf by the river.
	[Do not let them find me now. Do not let them take me now...]
	A shadowed form dropped in front of her, and she instinctively recoiled,
bewilderment and disbelief clearly written across her face. The stranger
straightened, then flicked a hand inside the darkness of its robes and drew a
katana, inwardly amused by the angry, disbelieving protest in the girl's mind
and the supreme effort it took for her to keep from lashing out at him.
	The girl struggled to form the words, the incoherence of fear threatening her
speech. "Who are you?"
	"The bringer of your death." The katana's blade caught the dying sun's rays,
shining with the cold intensity of killing steel, and it seemed to the young
woman that it was covered with blood. She shivered despite herself, struggling
to keep the movement unseen. Fear at this time would only increase, would only
hasten, the danger, the bloodshed.
	Still, she shuddered in fear, as much as she did not want to show it. It was
an almost imperceptible movement, made even more so because there was strength
behind her apparent frailty, steel concealed behind the petals of the flower.
However, the assassin noted it, and smiled cruelly. 
	The girl's eyes narrowed, strangely, as the assassin approached her with
deliberately slow steps meant to prolong her dread and tension. Her hand
flicked to her obi and to the small dagger concealed there, clutching it as
her only link to life and hope of surviving.
	However, she could not stop a short scream that escaped her suddenly pale
lips as the assassin blurred towards her, katana glinting in the rays of the
sun with its unforgiving steel that thirsted for her blood.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
	Kenshin arrived by the river several moments later. His eyes narrowed, then
widened, as they pierced the obscuring curtain of distance to make out the
figures of the black-robed assassin and the young woman. Even at the great
distance that separated them he could feel the tension in the air, the young
woman's fear and her panic as she fell to the ground and the assassin raised
his katana. Kenshin recognized it, and with the memories of a killer, knew the
move: swift, fatal... and if he did not reach the girl she would be dead in
the space of a few seconds.
	He tensed, his muscles taut, then streaked forward with all of his legendary
speed, desperately trying to reach her in time.
	Surprisingly, he did not need to.
	Just as the katana's blade was about to pierce the young woman's throat and
as Kenshin was runnning towards her with all of his speed, the young woman
rolled away and came to her feet in one swift, graceful movement, the slit in
the faded silk of her kimono the only mark of the katana's strike.
        	Kenshin felt an inward jolt of surprise as the girl faced the
assassin again, the air around her no longer filled with fear but with
diamond-hard determination as she dodged the assassin's attack once again and,
with a tightly controlled movement, brought the dagger in her hand sweeping
across the assassin's side, drawing blood. The girl and her attacker drew
apart again, facing each other.
	He was hidden only several meters from them, waiting to make his move, not
wanting to distract the girl or interfere with her concentration, when the
girl's large lavender eyes flickered suddenly to him as if she had known he
was there. The dark pupils dilated, then contracted in recognition and terror
of a new and greater threat. Kenshin felt a strange blow against his mind.
	[You!]
	Then suddenly an image from washed over his consciousness... darkness, then
eyes... frightened eyes, wide and open in horror... then a dark reflection of
himself in them, a reflection taken from a past he had long tried to forget.
Kenshin tried to shake himself free, but still the gaze of the eyes followed
him, held him in place by the power of his guilt.
	And as he shook himself free of the images he saw the girl staring at him
with her strange, mesmerizing lavender eyes he had seen in his dreams so many
years before, accusing, uncomprehending. Kenshin tried to take a step forward,
and couldn't, not even as the assassin cut the girl across the back as she
twisted away once second too late, even as the girl fell to the ground with
her lavender gaze from a dark and unclear past still fixed on him as he
watched, held in stasis.      
	[No... not you...]
	The Hitokiri inside him stirred, golden coils awakening in a hiss of angry
fire, bursting free of the bonds the girl's strangely familiar eyes had
trapped him in and streaking towards the crumpled form on the ground as the
assassin raised his katana to plunge it into the bloodied blue silk of the
young woman's kimono.
	The katana's blade met only grassy turf. Kenshin, his eyes now deepening into
violet and with the young woman in his arms, heard the cry of bitter despair
that escaped the assassin's lips as the katana missed its target.
	He looked back a split-second later. The assassin was gone.
	Kenshin frowned, thinking back to several months, almost a year, ago, when he
had first saved Kaoru from Gohei. In some ways, it was like his first meeting
with Kaoru, this strange encounter, yet now the girl had not escaped
relatively unscathed - Kaoru's was only a small wound - and the assassin had
disappeared. Disappeared soundlessly, leaving no trace but blood...
	(Such was I, once..) He set the girl down on the grass, taking care not to
touch her wound. Even though he could not see her eyes, shadowed over as they
were by the long, dark, hair that escaped its pins and fell in a veil over her
face, he could feel her confusion and fear.
	(Why?)
	He shook his head to clear it of the thoughts that had clouded it since he
had first seen the young woman. Even as he first saw her he had felt a tug at
his consciousness, a link to his past, in the depths of her lavender eyes. And
now her strange attitude towards him, the air of mystery and of fear around
her, the assassin that had wounded her... these questions crowded at the back
of his mind, begging for answers.
        Kenshin dismissed those thoughts with a flick of his red hair and
started towards Dr. 
Takani Megumi's clinic, carrying the unconscious girl.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
        Megumi frowned as she probed her patient's wound.
        "Is there something wrong, Megumi-dono?" Kenshin's voice was concerned
and tight with worry. He had seated himself at the farthest corner of the
room, not so much as to watch the doctor and her patient, but to protect them
from what harm had been hovering at the very edges of his vision, unrealized
and unseen but with its dark warning still there. To Megumi's eyes something
had been troubling him, for since he came in with the girl his eyes had been
more shadowed than usual.
	Megumi looked up from her examination of the young woman, clearly baffled.
"Nothing much, Ken-san... it's just that the wound won't clot easily. It's a
good thing you brought her to me or..." Her voice trailed off, leaving the
rest of the sentence unsaid but clear in the somber light of her brown eyes.
She turned back to her patient, drawing needle and thread from a box on a
table. "This might hurt," she warned as she waved Kenshin to an adjoining room
and, drawing the white gi the girl was wearing down, cleaned her patient's
back in preparation for stitching.
	The girl nodded, her lavender eyes alive with pain and her lips white. She
held something tightly clutched in her right hand, as if she was holding it
for support, and as Megumi finished the stitching of the wound she saw,
through the pale fingers that loosened around it, that it was a four-pointed
star carved from a single diamond, rainbow fire burning in its heart.
	Megumi stopped, eyes keenly observing every detail of the girl's
embroidered... now faded dress, her manner, the star. (Who is this girl? It's
not likely that anyone would want to kill her, as Ken-san said... and if she
belongs to a high-ranking family, she would have been kidnapped or taken as a
hostage... not killed.
	It is strange.
	Stranger, because she is no ordinary person. Those eyes...
	Those eyes, and why anyone would seek her death...)
	Shaking herself free of those curious thoughts, she applied a bandage to the
wound. "Finished." Relief was evident in her voice, and also strain. The wound
had not been easy to stitch.
	"Arigatou, Takani-san," the girl said, smiling slightly even at the pain of
her now-bandaged wound. This was the first time she had spoken, and her voice
was soft, sweet but with barely-concealed sadness below its surface, and
Megumi felt an answering chord of pity in herself, as if she had seen a
spirit's kindred sorrow. Kindred sorrow in a stranger, no less, with many
things unknown about her... for instance, her name. Kenshin had introduced her
to Megumi, but strangely -- or perhaps not -- he had not mentioned the girl's
name. Perhaps he himself didn't know it.
	Or knew, but didn't want to know and so pushed the knowledge into the realm
of ignorance? The thought was pushed aside almost as soon as it appeared in
her mind. For later. There would be time for reflection... later.
	Megumi nodded her acknowledgement as she took one of her older cotton kimonos
out of a drawer. "Here," she said, handing the girl the kimono, "I hope this
will fit you. Your kimono was... stained and ripped beyond repair."
	"Arigatou."
	"You are welcome, ...?"
	The girl seemed to sense the question in Megumi's voice. "Miyumi," she said,
inclining her head. "Hoshi Miyumi."
	"...Miyumi-san... and please, just call me Megumi."
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
	Kenshin, who had been looking out the window and listening at the same time,
shivered 
imperceptibly upon hearing the girl's name. (Hoshi? The girl's family sounds
familiar... where have I heard that before?)
	(And where is her family?) Again an image flashed before him, called up from
the regions of his mind and memory he never knew existed... darkness, and
blood, and the sense of an unwanted alien presence. A momentary surge of anger
and pity... and strangely, regret... welled up inside him. (Dead...?)
        	(I didn't know her... But it's like I... always have...)
	The unspoken questions in her lavender eyes replayed amongst the other
shadows of his thought. Her bewilderment on his saving her, the question...
[Why?] And then the strange gleam of recognition in her eyes, the unspoken
[You!] and the blow against his mind.
	The finely-honed danger sense, like the warning of cold wind before the
storm, spoke softly in his mind, awakening old memories. Stirring the shadow
into reality.
	The shadow... becoming reality? Horror at the ancient fear that resided deep
inside him for years flashed through his mind, haunting him as the girl's
lavender eyes had.
	No.
	The shadow would stay in the realm of illusion. Never reality.
	He hoped.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
	After a few moments, Kenshin silently walked over to Megumi and spoke quietly
with her, taking his leave as always politely but without being able to hide
the trouble in his voice. Other people might have been deceived by the mask of
the innocent rurouni he wore, but to Megumi the mask had slipped, showing the
deep, serious Kenshin that was neither rurouni or hitokiri.
	She wondered	what might have brought this about.
	Miyumi...?
	The girl's eyes tugged at her, alive with memories, drawing her deep into the
shadows of unrealized thought. Megumi subconsciously shook free of the girl's
gaze and closed her own brown eyes, trying to see what they could not. 
	No, this was not right. Ever since she had seen her... her eyes... she had
felt the first tendrils of uneasiness uncoiling deep inside her, and deny it
as she might, she could still feel the cold foreboding in her. The lavender
depths of Miyumi's eyes awakened in her fear of the known and the mystery of
her past. Fear of their uncanny reflection of Kenshin's eyes...
	Not an exact reflection of the violet... instead, lavender, a fainter shade
than the deep purple of his eyes. Megumi stole a glance at Miyumi, whose eyes
were shadowed once again with the unreadable thoughts in her mind. Lavender,
paler, but still the *expression* of sorrow in those eyes was almost the
duplicate of Kenshin's eyes when he was brooding over his own thoughts. Megumi
suppressed a shudder in spite of herself. (Be honest with yourself, Megumi.
How many violet or lavender eyes do you expect to see in a lifetime? And with
these eyes having met so strangely, how can you be sure that this was pure
chance, as you have been trying to make yourself believe ever since you saw
the girl?)
	Megumi shook her head, dark hair veiling her face from Miyumi. (No... I see
now.... this is not chance. This is but some trick of fate...)
	She looked up and at the mysterious eyes that hid in them both mystery and
the forewarning... eyes that were full of light, and still shadowed by
knowledge of a deeper darkness.
	(Not some ordinary person, indeed... she looks as if she had just passed
through another world...)
	Realization chilled her. (Another world...) Then, with the split-second
swiftness she had always known, she made a decision.
	The hairs at the back of Megumi's neck prickled as she plumbed the depth of
those lavender eyes, deeper, deeper, searching for the answer to the mystery
and the truth of the coming darkness. Deeper into herself and into the
lavender mirror that was the girl... testing the strangeness she had felt ever
since she had fully seen the gaze of those eyes.
	Until suddenly, with the relief of the weight pressing down on the back of
her mind, Megumi rose from the depths of her own memories and thoughts as a
pearl diver rises from the ocean, with the pearl of future's insight grasped
tightly in her palm.
	This was not some trick of fate.
	No trick at all!
	Instead, warning. True, merciful -- for she knew that if it had not come they
would have been overcome by the darkness -- warning that would be as the lull
before the supernatural storm.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
	"Where *is* Kenshin?" Kaoru asked no one in particular, her voice wavering.
It was already evening, and stars were shining their guardian lights against
the darkening curtain of sky. Kenshin had disappeared hours ago, at sunset,
without a trace, leaving no sign of where he went. She had worried so much
since then, torturing herself by imagining countless possibilities behind
which loomed the specter of an old fear... the fear that finally, he had gone,
never to return.
	(No, no... please... you promised.)
	Footsteps behind her caused her to turn, hoping, and to see Kenshin trudging
towards the dojo, his face weary and troubled, his gi stained with blood Kaoru
hoped was not his own. She found herself running towards him, the worry and
fear in her heart erased and replaced by the fulfilled hope and joy of
welcome.
	"Kenshin!" There was a world of questions in her eyes, and then she noticed
the blood on his gi and looked up at him with distress shadowing the pools of
clear blue as she clutched the bloodstained gi.
	Kenshin gently took the hand clutching his gi into his own. "Daijoubu,
Kaoru-dono... I'm all right."
	"...Where have you been?" She tried to keep the overwhelming concern from her
voice, and could not. "You should have said where you were going! I... worried
so much about you!" Kaoru's relief almost spilled over into tears.
	"Gomenasai, Kaoru-dono, you shouldn't have worried about me."
	Kaoru smiled, almost tearfully. The gentle touch of the hand holding hers,
almost hesitantly, as if Kenshin were afraid to touch something infinitely
delicate and precious -- was almost painful, his never-ending non-acceptance
in perceived unworthiness of her, of her worry, tearing at her. (If you don't
think yourself worthy of my worry, how, then, will you accept what I want to
give you? Happiness... forgiveness... love?
	But still it's all right... always all right... as long as you come back...)
"It's okay, Kenshin. Come on inside, and you can tell me about it."
	"Hai."
	They walked the few steps to the dojo in silence. As Kenshin stepped inside
the dojo, Kaoru's hand still held gently in his own, he heard the wind whisper
in his ear, calling back bitter, hate-filled memories, bringing with it the
chilling feeling that he was being watched. Almost instinctively Kenshin
turned, shielding Kaoru with his body, but the wind was gone, leaving only the
memory of its presence and the premonition of unseen evil.



Some notes on part 1 (What Brings the Wind aka Warning):
I don't know why Rurouni Kenshin, at least for me, lends itself so...
easily... to the supernatural. Maybe this is because of who Kenshin was and
is, the darker side of him that has never been fully revealed. Or maybe
because I've been reading too many fantasy series ^_^
About my writing, well... I know I need a lot more polish and a good
proofreader/draft reader... plus a good dictionary of Japanese words and some
research as to some of Japan's history and culture, but I hope that it wasn't
as... as... not-written-but-scribbled-on-a-tissue as the unrevised version
written a long, long time ago (aka the first one I ever posted).
For those who have read the previous revised version, I've changed a few
things... and added some. Megumi's thoughts, for one (at the suggestion of a
kind person who did not flame me for that excuse for a fic...)
Oh... about Megumi's thoughts... well, I thought she'd be insightful enough to
be able to see what was hidden, and I've always held the opinion that if there
should be someone blessed with the gift of supernatural foresight, it should
be her -- she's gone through enough to be able to sense that, and with what
gift she has, at least in this fic... while Kenshin has enough "danger sense"
to warn him. So basically what happens is that they both feel warned about
something, and they know it's evil, but they don't know what it is. Thought
it'd be better to set the tone for part 2.
Comments, questions, and suggestions to improve are very very welcome at
miaviolet@usa.net or hoshi.sumire@icestorm.net -- just don't flame me, I beg
you...

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