Author's Note: This is just something I found on an old disk drive from years ago. I am looking to get back into writing the story and have been toying about with it. Basically, I've since learned that I have an (ASD) Autistic Spectrum Disorder. As well as co-morbid disorders that combined explain a lot about me. It was reassuring to learn that a lot of my issues with the rules of language actually have a cause. Without getting into all the other issues I've had and struggled to understand why it was so different for me.

Question - Would you prefer I continue from where I left off and not perform a rewrite from the beginning?

I'm rather torn between leaving it as it originally was, or with replacing the current chapters with a recent rewrite. I don't plan to post anything until I've got all/most of it written (no more 7 year waits for a finished story).

A short Hiko POV written about 5/6 years ago.

The eagerness was naked on the younger Himura's face. Childish greed, delight and want, all displayed undisguised as chubby fingers reached out in anticipation. Hiko Seijuro dropped the soft pastry into the toddler's opened mouth instead, which then chomped down quick enough to only narrowly avoid taking the sword master's fingertips off.

The boy had inherited his life giver's feminine visage. Thick plentiful hair that had sprouted in abundance as the months passed since his birth. Only the eyes screamed of an inheritance from the sire. Or so Hiko Seijuro supposed, given that his paths had never crossed with the man.

In this boy, he knew there would be a true successor to the ancient Hiten Mitsuruugi Ryu. His female student, an aberrant happening in the history of the School of Swordsmanship, simply did not desire to take on the mantle.

Until the girl had upset his simple life, he had never fathomed passing on the style. Nor would he have pictured a scrap of a girl child with the look of a foreigner as his chosen apprentice. The girl had possessed the spirit of a swordsman even then. Causing him to disregard her female stature, training her over the years, long before the Bakumatsu claimed her innocence.

He had turned a feeble foreign looking girl child into a Dragon. It was an achievement greater than any run of the mill boy student could've been. The Hiten Mitsuruugi style had been used against countless other styles in the course of the war, showing them all that there was no school equal to this one.

What he had never expected was for the girl turned to dragon to whelp. He had mistakenly believed, a by-product he supposed of tradition and present patriarchy that by pursuing male interests, Kenko would lose any feminine yearnings.

That she had not, made him reconsider the roles woman played. Kenko could be an abnormality, but as a smart man with progressive ideas, he did ponder if regardless of the physical differences...if other women could be as independent as his female student.

He had raised her as a boy for the most part. Something that made him wonder if the natural elegance, softness and subordinate nature of women was truly the right of things. Raise a boy to be a man, and he would become a man. Raise a girl to become a woman, and that is what she would be.

Logic, reason and rational thought had always walked alongside him. Clarity was never something he had lacked, as far as he was concerned; something that made his focus on what he had taken for granted was the natural order of things.