"Embrace long desired, desperately craved; now promises only emptiness." beautifully and poignantly summarised.. makes me feel sad again thinking about Kaoru's tears in that scene. Thanks for writing such short beautiful pieces -

Beautiful!

helpless, hopeless, heartbroken... exposed

feel the pain... the truly talented author elicits emotion and feelings in the reader.

ginny

Wow. Very, very pretty, very eloquent despite the brevity. I'm impressed.

Wow!

poetry.. drawing, vivid, powerful... and so wat if i am repeating myself... _

"Embrace long desired, desperately craved; now promises only emptiness."

simply beutiful

I like this one too. I only have the manga (They took it off the air before I really got interested... curses. Just enough to remember Kenshin's speech patterns, Sano, and Shikijo, for whatever reason...) and that it is one of the scenes I find myself flipping too quite often. *blushes* Eloquent. Slightly abstract. Moving.

Darn! Now I wish I watched the anime; I only read the manga.

I especially liked: "Embrace long desired, desperately craved; now promises only emptiness." That was a very beautiful line, one I had to read over and over until I was satisfied with knowing it.

You did an excellent job of delving into this brief scene. Your depiction of Kaoru's feelings was very nice. Unfortunately, I don't much like Kaoru. I consider her to be an incredibly immature, weak person with major anger management issues. Yes, she does have some good points, such as her willingness to accept a person for who they are, not who they were. But she is definitely not one of my favorite characters. However, that said, I still feel that you wrote a very true-to-the-episode scene and I applaud your incredible talent at creating these short, vivid ficlets. Thanks!

You capture the intense bittersweet irony of this situation so well in the line,"Embrace long desired, desperately craved; now promises only emptiness." Lovely.

What a lovely rendition of the scene where Kenshin takes leave of Kaoru. It was like reading poetry! Good job!

This was beautiful and amazingly powerful. no speech necessary to show her thoughts and agony at that precice moment. EXCELLENT job. i love the idea that she's been waiting so long for that hug, only to recieve it when it means he's leaving.

amazing...

sirius

Beautiful. There is no better word.

Oh my... that really was beautiful... You're just so good at these!