Kenji - Part Two

It was when Misao went to turn onto a main thorough fair and his father stopped her that Kenji realised how odd he had been acting since they had arrived I Kyoto. He walked down the street with a familiar kind of grace, something that seemed strange to see his father with, he also seemed to keep towards the shadier parts of the road and if anyone where to even remotely glance at him for longer than necessary, he would look like he was about to bolt.

The day after their arrival, when his father had left to see this Hiko, Kenji was able to sneak off, wanting to see Kyoto for himself. Stepping out into the late spring sun, Kenji had little idea where to go first or how to even get there in the first place. He turned left, deciding to just wander for a little while. Half an hour later as he was sitting on a bench outside a small dango stall, he noticed an elder man, a few years older than his father, giving him odd looks across the street. He would stare, shake his head, look away and then stare again, repeating a number of times. When he turned away again, Kenji quietly left to watch the man's expression and he was rewarded when the man went to stare again and turned as pale as the moon. Odd.

As a new day came in Kyoto, Kenji learnt what this Hiko person wanted, apparently he had simply wanted to talk, Kenji didn't know what about but he did know that his father had come back with an undisclosed bundle. He wondered who Hiko was to his father because he wouldn't just come to Kyoto for just anything, especially after to obviously avoiding it for so many years.

Later that day Kenji went for a stroll through town while his father continued with his odd behaviour by running a mysterious errand. It was when he was in the main shopping district that Kenji was stopped with a tight grip to his shoulder by a man with an ashen face.

"You! You shouldn't be here, you should be dead. You should have gone back to the hell you came from when it was all over. You really are a demon, you haven't aged a day, Battousai!"

Kenji was able to get away from the strange man but it left him confused. He knew who Battousai was, everyone did, the Demon of Kyoto, a man who cut down his enemies in a flash of steel and blood without a single thought, a true monster of a man. Although he couldn't figure out why that man would mistake him for such a person, so he put it into the back of his mind and moved on with his day.

It was when he brought up his encounter with the strange man over dinner, and told his mother what happened, that she shared a look with his father, that he began to wonder what was really the reason behind the mistaken identity. It was there, that night, over dinner that he learnt the truth about his father for the first time.

He was told that at the age of 8 his father had been sold to slavers after his parents had died of cholera and that on the way to Kyoto to be sold, the caravan had been ambushed by bandits and he was the only one to survive. He learnt that this Hiko man was his master and taught his father to wield a sword and one of the deadliest styles, Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu, which was not only much more difficult to learnt but also incredibly different from his mother's family style. He discovered that the reason that he had been mistaken for Battousai was that when his father was 14 he left his master to join in the Bakumatsu and became a hitokiri. And he was told about Yukishiro Tomoe and her tragic demise that became the reason behind his father's oath to never kill again.

Kenji discovered a lot of things that night, he was finally told of his father's whole past, from his parents death to meeting to meeting his mother and then about Shishio and Enishi and how he brought everyone around him into the problems from his past.

It had turned out that the bundle Hiko had given his dad was the daisho he had used I the Bakumatsu, being told about how it was time to forgive himself and to do that he first had to forgive the swords. Swords that had been kept and cleaned by his dad's master so that they would never be used for murder again.

It was there, that night, over dinner that Kenji got respect for his dad.

I'm thinking of changing the name of the series, maybe 'The abstract diary of and ex hitokiri' or 'The life and mind of Himura Kenshin'. What do people think.

27.09.17