A Job for Sanosuke
Omake 2 – Unwitting Informants
By Shirou Shinjin.
Disclaimer: I have not, do not, and most likely will never own Rurouni Kenshin, or its characters. They belong to various evil corporations, and the wonderful Watsuki-sama. I'm just going to borrow them for a bit, k?
The man was a mess. He had several nasty bruises on his arms, and a huge black and purple bulge on the side of his face. His friends weren't much better, either.
Strangely, the police officer that dropped the three men off at the clinic had just shaken his head and mumbled something about "idiot yakuza punks" and left. Megumi could only assume that the officer felt the three had gotten what they deserved.
And although she had a job to do—namely patching them back together—she couldn't help but wonder why they were are shaken up as they were. She suspected it had something to do with a certain rooster-head, if the fist marks were any indication. She'd held those hands enough times to know their shape...
Megumi forced the image of Sanosuke's strong, masculine hands...
Megumi refocused herself on her patient who was short, snivelly and smelt like spilt soba. There, much better. Now to find out what happened.
"So, mind telling me why you look like you were hit by a carriage?" she pried gently. The boy just shook his head and said nothing. So they wanted to play it the hard way, did they? Well, Takani Megumi was never one to back down from a challenge.
She put on her most male-brain-melting smile, and tried the old buttering-up technique. "Well, they certainly must have ganged up on you, to have badly beaten three such fit young men..."
The two in the back had clearly heard her, and were now looking at her curiously. The one she was currently treating still seemed a little leery. Time to push the advantage...
"And what an awful thing to do! There must have been at least a dozen of them, if not more! The shame of attacking innocent young men like that!" It was probably all lies... he was an idiot, but Sanosuke didn't beat people up randomly. But she had to stroke their ego if she wanted any information from them.
"Ye... yeah... not fair at all..." her patient muttered. And so it begins.
"It's such a shame that there are such violent people in our city. I'll bet it was one of those no-good ruffians who started the whole thing, right?"
"Yeah; right! It's all that weirdo's fault." The two in back nodded to this.
"Which weirdo was that? I only ask so I know to steer clear of him..."
The dim-witted fool thought this over for a moment before coughing uncomfortably. "That pink-wearing weirdo."
Ken-san! Why would Ken-san beat up... no, that didn't make sense. If Ken-san was responsible for this, they'd still be unconscious, and with sakabatou marks on them. Maybe he asked Sano to... but...
"You mean that red-haired man that carries a sword?" She didn't believe this, there had to be another explanation.
"No; not him. The other pink-wearing weirdo." Oh, so there's two of them, now.
"I... I can't say I've ever heard of him before." Megumi thought for a moment as she wrapped a bandage around the boy's arm. "There wasn't a tall man with a red bandanna, wearing a white jacket involved, was there?"
"Hey, yeah, that was him! That was the weirdo!" This was getting weird. Sano wears white. But they were talking about someone wearing pink...
"But you said he was wearing pink. Doesn't he usually wear white?"
The one she was treating spoke up next. "Yeah, well; we thought so, too. But you shoulda seen the weirdo yesterday at that restaurant..."
An image of a strangely familiar waiter in a hideous pink kimono floating into Megumi's mind, and she smiled. "Do tell..."
Owari
Author's Rambling
I never intended to write this. I was seriously prepared to let Sano off the hook with Megumi entirely. She was just supposed to walk away and never know the pretty waiter in pink was Sanosuke.
But my reviewers seemed to have other ideas.
When it came down to it, between all those comments asking when Megumi was going to find out, and the temptation to make Sano suffer one last time, I caved in and wrote this. The three yakuza punks provided the perfect vehicle with which to tell Megumi, and I loved the idea of her using her feminine wiles to... 'extract' the information from them. Poor Megumi doesn't get to do that very often in the series.
Originally, the scene was much more elaborate, but I think that after AJfS, short and sweet works well.
Until next time,
Ja, ne
–賜狼審神
22nd April, 2006