WARNING! THE LAST CHAPTER (Chapter 21: Break) HAS BEEN EDITED!! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE INTENSELY CONFUSED AS TO WHAT THE HECK’S HAPPENING HERE, GO BACK AND READ THE REVISED VERSION! ELSEWISE, YOU JUST MIGHT BE A TAD LOST!

A/N:

So much angst...so much sap...so much talking...yep, that would be the end you see looming over there past the leaping plot progressions. Blah. I’ll keep this rant short so I can really go at it at the end. Maybe I’ll even devote an entire page to the final rant...I’m sure I’ll have a good many things to explain when that time comes. Now, off we go!

Disclaimer: Nothing’s changed from the twenty-some chapters that came before this. I STILL don’t own RK or FAKE, so don’t sue me. I have no money for you, anyways.

DANCNG PLUMS AND EIGHTH GRADE LITERATURE

Chapter Twenty-two: Losing Battles

There’s a light on in the room. It sits like a lone planet of cold brightness beside her; she’s reading a book, and I swear the light is orbiting her like the sun she is.

A voice.

“Is he waking up?”

Azrael and Dee did end up going to breakfast. They went to breakfast at Sherry’s---where very little was said between the two of them, the mood being tight and pensive---and then came back to Azrael’s apartment, where even less was said, and the mood was downright mournful. Dee had tried his very damndest to cheer up his moping old friend, but nothing had really worked. Azrael was depressed and depressing; Kenshin’s condition at any given time was the gauge of her own disposition. When Kenshin was good and doing well---or well enough that the doctors seemed to have some glimmer of hope---Azzie was good and doing well. She painted, called old acquaintances to babble about nothing, and was generally a likeable person on a whole.

But when Kenshin was on decline, Azrael was inaccessible and remote to even Dee and Ryo, the two she loved best. Her paintings felt like death, and conversations---if you could get her to talk at all---lasted the blunt whole of five minutes. She was the ice queen everyone had joked about during her days on the force---and nothing but the peace of mind that Kenshin was alright would melt the ice.

Any relationship held with Azrael was bound to be complicated and difficult. It was just the way of her---she was a woman who always seemed to lose, no matter the battlefield. Everything she did hold, though, she clutched onto with a will of iron; this tenacity was one of the things that always threw Dee for a loop. She’d said that in her younger days, she had been the perfect, stereotypical dyke---mostly because she had come out at an early age, and had an “image” to live up to. The years had mellowed her, though, and she was fairly laid back unless one of two conversation topics came up: her former wife, Tomoe Yukishiro, or her wife’s cousin, Kenshin Himura. Having come into the strange and complicated relationship of Azrael Tonbo and Kenshin Himura late in life, Dee had been very confused on a whole about this elusive and rarely seen cousin. He was a hovering ghost in Azrael’s eyes, and her inheritance at her wife’s death. Kenshin was something of Azrael’s first child, in a way---a child she had and raised with Tomoe.

Everything connected with Kenshin was a mess, and Azrael’s loyalty to him was borderline insane. She had quit the force because of him, and had refused a promotion job through the FBI---something she would have been exceptionally well suited for. Because of Kenshin Himura, Azrael had stayed in Salem for going on four years now, selling her art, illustrating children’s books, and raising her daughter.

She could have had a career, Dee would sometimes muse. He had first met her at her prime, when he, Ryo, and Azrael had been matched together for a particularly sticky case involving a cross-country drug ring. Azrael had had fire, then, so much so that she was this insane and baffling bundle of childish looks and rapier wit with a crack shot to boot. She could have had a damned good career, but she had dropped it all for Kenshin. He meant everything to her, and Dee was always left to wonder if it was by guilt or by love that she stayed with him.

Dee paused from his channel surfing to look up at her. Azrael was painting again, which, he knew, was not exactly a good thing. It meant she was venting, and the poor canvas was sure to be blasted with thick and mesmerizing layers of deathly blacks, bloody reds, and bruise-like violets. Azrael was not particularly good at venting---she was a deeply introverted person, and communication was not one of her stronger points. She communicated by art, and said art suffered because of it.

Surprisingly, though, she had orange splotches across her nose and a wide smear of yellow across her jawline; those were not precisely “venting” colors, so, with a hint of curiosity, Dee ambled off the couch to examine what she was working on. The messy artist did not acknowledge him as he leaned solicitously over her shoulder; she was very intent on her wide, fat brush, and everything else around her was mere details.

With a surgeon’s precision and a madman’s use of color, Azrael had brought to life a picture that was forever hung on the refrigerator just above Tommie’s finger-painted masterpieces---a simple and worn photograph of two girls and two boys hunched and concentrated over a misshapen and leaning sandcastle. The lot of them were not children, and were straining against adulthood; they were obviously too old by “cool” standards to be playing in the sand, but something special that bound them together alleviated the need for “cool”. The original photograph had been dull in coloring, a mirror of the gray wind, the gray sea, and gray water, but Azrael had replaced the grays with a sort of warm, mellow gold---probably filling in the gray she had now with the happiness she had felt then with her ‘children’ with her, and her arms looped around her wife’s waist. The four in the painting could have been gods. Maybe they were, because they were, in a way, immortal, although very much dead.

“You doing okay?” Dee asked, rubbing at her tense shoulders with his thumbs. Azrael dropped her brush into a cup on water and sighed.

“Well enough. I feel...light,” she said softly, still sounding weary. “After all these years, I’m finally fulfilling the promise I made to Plum. That has always been a weight.”

“The weights we carry...” Dee mused, allowing the thought to dribble off, unfinished. There could have been a myriad of endings to his little musing, and each was left to fill in his or her own.

“You sound unusually philosophical,” Azrael pointed out turning one dark eye on him. “Interesting.”

“You wear off on me,” he growled in mock-accusation, tousling her inky black curls. “Ryo will hardly recognize me when I come back home.”

“I think I’ll be coming with you,” Azrael said thoughtfully, swirling her brush in the cleaning water---it turned from pale blue to a dirty, dirty gray. It felt like a reoccurring theme. “I haven’t got much left for me here.”

Kenshin swam dizzily between light and dark, sleep and waking, for a full day after his argument with Koi. It was strange, this lack of...well, this lack of everything which hung like a weight between his shoulders, a cavern of nothing in his chest. He knew, quite rationally, that he ought to wake up. He ought to get up. He ought to get dressed, brush his teeth, eat something, comb his hair---he ought to be a decent living being on the outside, even if chaos hovered under his skin. Above all that, he ought to see Kaoru.

This was a nagging thought which he tried to dissuade and ignore---why, for God’s sake, would Kaoru want to see him now, after all this? It was as obvious as the nose on his face that he had failed, and that Kaoru had been sucked into the noxious vacuum of his hellish life. The idyllic months past might as well have been a dream, now---a dream that would break the moment he woke up from this nightmare.

And so, he slept. Ken slept, and dreamt of Kaoru so hard it could have been real. Oh, dreaming of her hurt, it was so real. His idle conscious mind told him that they were dreams, and he really tried to keep a grip on what was real and what was not, but what is reality for a man whose whole reality is illusion? Who was he to draw lines? Who was he to say that it was a dream-Kaoru lying in bed beside him, and not the real thing?

Kenshin wanted it to be real. With every fiber of his being, he wished it real---if it was reality, then he never had to wake up into a world where Kaoru was bruised right down to her soul, and where the bright red balloon of his future with her had been punctured with a pin, slowly losing air until there was nothing left but a deflated skin. If this was Kaoru...then he would die in his sleep, so as to be with her like this forever.

Oh, Kaoru. Kenshin wearily sat up in bed, moving his old bones so as to get closer to his favorite dream, to glean a little rest from this sleep. She was curled up beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm, dark hair oozed out around her to create oily shadows against the white of their bed and the white of her skin, his skin. Kaoru always looked like a weary little girl, her cheeks still flushed like she was five years old and chasing after invisible pixies. Her lips were half-parted in sleep, the whisper of breath intolerably real.

It was a very convincing dream. Hoping not to wake her---but, then again, she was a figment of his imagination, wasn’t she? There is no waking what is not asleep---Kenshin thumbed her soft lower lip, a whisper of flesh against flesh. He could feel her breath as if she truly was asleep next to him, and the thought of it made his heart race and ache at the same time.

Even if this was A Kaoru, it was not His Kaoru. This Kaoru had not been beaten into submission---she lacked the grays, greens, and sickly blues of bruises against her white face, the split lip, the black-ringed eye, and the creases that came of a beautiful girl looking at herself in the mirror and seeing a monster. This Kaoru was completely unlined and unblemished, save for a pale little scar underneath her left eyebrow. Although, even that looked like the memory of a piercing, not a fresh wound beat into her lovely face.

Ken stroked her lip again, wanting to kiss her, but not wanting to wake her. He was far too gentle and passive to worry her; he knew this, because it was just the deepest writing of his psyche. He probably would have lain there forever with her in his arms if he had not woken up---woken up to a high, thin wail, like a kitten. Ken stiffened, waiting for this darkened room to dissolve into his apartment, where he was sprawled out---passed out, really---on the floor next to the telephone.

It didn’t. The wailing continued, the room stayed irrevocably in place, and Kaoru awoke with a flutter of dark lashes.

Kenshin didn’t want to wake up. He didn’t even breathe.

With a giggle, Kaoru licked his fingertip---which was still pressed against her lip---took his hand and kissed it.

“Kaoru?” Ken whispered, not even daring to hope that this was real. “Sweetheart, aren’t you still at the hospital?”

Kaoru gave him a curious look.

“You really need more sleep, Kenshin,” she said, tugging at his unraveled, half-undone braid. “And here I was thinking I was running on autopilot lately---you’re even worse than I am. I got out of the hospital two weeks ago, sweetie---you picked me up, remember?”

Ken did not remember. Ken did not remember anything.

“You worry so much,” Kaoru said gently, drawing him close, so that her face snuggled into the curve of his neck. “Honestly, one would think you were the one suffering from toxemia...God, Kenshin, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Ken said, meaning every nuance of the words, but still feeling as if he had had a drop-in by a Twilight Zone episode. Toxemia? The term was faintly familiar, but he didn’t think that it had anything to do with the Akira run-in...toxemia, toxemia, toxemia...

The wailing hadn’t stopped. At first, Ken had thought it was a fire-engine passing several blocks away, but the fact that it hadn’t faded into the distance made him consider otherwise---that, and the sigh Kaoru gave, sitting up in bed.

“I think it’s your turn with Kenji.”

Kenji?

“The formula’s on the counter---heat it up in the microwave for a little, but make sure it’s not too hot---oh, and the nipple sometimes screws on funny, so tip it upside down for leaks before feeding him. Remember the burp-up rag, too, because you’ll get no kisses smelling like baby vomit.”

Kenshin nodded, crawling out of bed and following the little wail---a baby’s cry, he realized with a little awe---in a daze.

He finally recognized where he was---not his scrunched apartment next to Kaoru’s in the little city---he was in Portland again, in his uncle’s yellow house. The never-never-land house, where he had grown up with his two sweet mothers...the house he had left in tears, trying to grasp a little hope, just to have it dribble like oil between his needy fingers.

Yeah, he thought, leaning dizzily against one of the whitewashed hallway walls. This is it. This is home---home with Kaoru and---and---and our baby?

The wail led him to a room painted bright blue---his room. The room he grew up in with Sano, their bunk bed pushed against that vacated wall, their posters and pictures tacked up where the duckie mobile now hung. The effect of seeing this room after so many years was enough to rock him on the balls of his feet, enough to tie a thick knot in his stomach, enough to bring dry tears to his closed throat.

Incredible. Incredible, that not one crack had changed in all these years, despite the storms that had raged in the safe box of these four blue walls.

A little squalling bundle in blue whimpered for his attention. Two little fists peeked out of the bedding, small enough to still waver because of lack of muscle strength. With a bit of apprehension, Kenshin dipped his hands into the cradle, making sure to properly support the frail little neck and little bottom, just like Plum had with her dolls.

Babies are built all silly, Plum had said, once, laughing at her toddler cousin, who was dragging his doll by one chubby plastic leg. They’ve got these big heads, and little necks that don’t work right for months. But they’re cute, ne?

Baby Kenji was probably about a month old. He had lost that red-raisin, wrinkled newborn look, but still didn’t quite have the fat, jubilant look of the babies in magazines. He seemed quite put out to have had to cry for so long, and his little face was scrunched into a howl, red as a tomato.

Or red as his hair. My hair, Kenshin amended, joggling the baby a bit and whispering pleas of “don’t cry, Kenji, don’t cry”. It was a mantra---a mantra that Kenji seemed to understand, quieting down to dribbling whimpers. He stared up at Kenshin---his father, however misplaced---with impossibly blue eyes, echoing his mother, and the blue room of Kenshin’s youth.

The baby was a tangible, solid weight in his arms. Where their skin touched, there was warmth. The big, gulping, baby-tears tasted like salt, and the tiny heartbeat was a constant drum against his fingertips.

This was reality.

What had been paled against this---this feeling, this moment, this touch. This made everything else seem like a dream, quietly fading away with the midnight moon...

Kenji started to cry again, and the transcendental moment was broken.

“Hungry, huh?” Ken queried his tiny charge, stroking back his fuzz of dark red hair. “Let’s see if we can’t fix that, ‘kay?” The baby quieted to sniveling again, a sign that he was, indeed, Kenshin’s son---most babies would not have such an even temperament.

The formula, bottle, and assorted paraphernalia were laid out just as Kaoru had said---it took Ken a good three minutes to figure out what did what (during which, Kenji started crying yet again), but it wasn’t long before the bottle was ready, and the baby fed. Ken settled down on the couch with him, thinking now would be an exceptionally good time to start figuring out where, precisely, he was.

No, he knew where he was. His childhood home, which he seemed to be sharing with Kaoru and little Kenji. He knew who he was, too: Kenshin Himura-McEwen, who---if the gold ring on his third left finger denoted anything---was happily married to Kaoru Himura-McEwen. He considered this a definite plus---because, honestly, this sort of outcome was something he had only dreamt about before while thinking about What Ifs. Marrying Kaoru...having children...settling down into Happily Ever After... Gah, this all seemed somewhat surreal.

Ken had a sudden thought.

Sano. Sano would know---Sano always knew what was going on (debatable, actually, but Ken had a very high image of Sano), and he wouldn’t care or think it odd if Ken called him out of the blue and asked “um, so...yeah. I’m living in Portland with Kaoru. I think I have a kid, too. How’d I get here again?”

Kenji was suckling happily on his bottle, totally unaware of the train of thought his father was leading. He was so happy with his bottle, actually, that he didn’t even complain when his daddy mumbled an apology, situating him on the couch with pillows to prop him up as he went in search of the phonebook and phone. Fortunately, it was a quick search, so the baby was not abandoned for long.

Since the baby and bottle monopolized his hands, Ken was forced to use a knee to momentarily hold up Kenji while he dialed (he had found Sano’s number to be the old one, to the same apartment he had had before moving for his job at Kenjo), and then cradled the phone against his cheek and shoulder as soon as he finished dialing.

It was ringing. That was a good thing.

Unfortunately, it just kept ringing...

...maybe Sano was asleep?

Ken was starting to get a crick in his neck when the answering machine finally picked up, but---

“Hi, this is Erika! I’m not home right now, so give me your name and phone number when I beep, and I’ll be sure to call you back! Beep!”

He hung up before the machine fully caught the call, feeling a vague sense of “what the hell...”. Ken checked the number again, just to make sure he had dialed it properly, found that he had, and then sat back to brood once again.

It was a fairly old phonebook, he rationalized. Not uncommon that Sano would move between the time this book had been published and now; no, not uncommon at all, considering how Sano was about keeping jobs.

Ken moved to check the phone book again---but the phone suddenly leapt to life, squealing a long, loud ring which echoed in the quiet house. Shocked, he quickly answered it with an immediate and completely automatic: “Himura residence, Ken speaking.”

He was met with laughter.

“Hello?” Ken tried, frowning at this.

Silence. Breathing on the other end, but silence nonetheless

Confused, and just about ready to write it off as a crank call, Ken juggled with Kenji again so he could hang up the phone, but---

“Don’t hang up.”

The voice on the other end was clipped and hot, hard as the edge of a sword and just as cutting. Ken’s heart rate at least doubled; his mouth went dry, like it was filled with sawdust. He knew the voice, because it could have been his own, had his voice harbored centuries of rage, masked with a thin skein of artificial gaiety. He knew the voice, and that made something in him want to die.

“’Nishi?” Ken croaked, his hold on baby Kenji tightening.

“My old pet name,” Enishi said with a laugh like a crackling fire. “How endearing.”

“Enishi, I don’t know how you got this number, but---“

“I said it once already, Little Red Riding Hood,” said Enishi. “Don’t hang up. If you do, I will appear before you can count to ten, and I will not be pleased. Unless you want to have an episode in front of your little boy, keep on the line. We’ll be pleasant enough about it, if you cooperate.”

“You bastard,” Kenshin growled, almost conscious of the rippling, agitated movement of ‘Battousai’ within him.

“Names, names,” Enishi Yukishiro chirped at Ken with cheerfulness so thick and false it was grating on the ears. “You always did like labeling things, but that’s beyond all this. Now then, how is my favorite little cousin doing today? Peachy? I’m sure you are, living in La-La Land with your widdle lady and baby?”

“Leave me be,” he hissed between his teeth, a sudden and inexplicable rage boiling under his ribcage, twisting his stomach into awful knots. It was as if the emotional tiger he kept chained and caged within his chest was clawing its way out of him, shredding his composure and resolve with wicked claws. “I haven’t ever bothered you---why do you have to hound me this way?”

“Oh, but you do bother me, my dear cousin. You, and Koi, and Shinta, and Rurouni, and all your other little friends---all you do is bother me. You just can’t do well enough alone and apart, can you? Nooo, you must get together and be a whole, happy little bastard.”

“What’s wrong with that?!” Ken barked, his knuckles white as he gripped the phone. “Why is it that I’m denied happiness every single time?!”

“Because you’re bad, little cousin,” Enishi replied, sounding as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “We both know that. Bad, bad, bad. I’m just here to say what you don’t want to, right?”

“You’re sickEnishi,” Ken hissed, livid. “Sick.”

“No, Kenshin, I think it’s you who are sick,” he replied with a lilt in his voice. “And I am your sickness.”

Ken didn’t know what to say to that. He sat with the phone to his ear, eyes wide, trying to comprehend what kind of oil Enishi was pouring down his throat when the voice on the other end started laughing---it was a hoarse, barking laughter, and it grated on his ears like nails drawn across a chalkboard.

“Do you want to know my secrets, cousin?” Enishi whispered, his rasping voice buzzing like a thousand insects trapped within his ears.

“I already know all your secrets,” Ken shakily replied, forcibly shoving memories of that whispering voice that kept bubbling up in his mind like black, greasy foam. “You told me everything already because you thought it was funny.”

“Yes, yes, you do know this one, even though you tried to forget it,” He admitted, a suppressed laugh in his voice. “Here’s the secret, Kenshin---the secret you’ve omitted from your memories, just because it haunts you,” Enishi said proudly, tauntingly, fiercely. “I’m dead.”

“No,” Ken said softly. “You can’t be.”

“Ah, yes, that’s what I told myself at first, too. I was shot and killed three years ago in a drug bust, but you just couldn’t let me go. I was too much of you to just disappear, so this is where I live---the lone villain among all the happy voices in Himura Kenshin’s head. And that makes me immortal, you know. As long as there is a sickness in you, I live.’

“Ironic, isn’t it? I made you sick, and now I’m forced to keep you that way. Naturally, I had to put a stop to you curing yourself, because if you heal, I’m through for good. So I distracted you---a large dose of calamity was just what you needed to keep things broken and lively. With you coming this close to accepting the Others and working through all your nasty emotional problems, I started worrying about my own well-being. Really, Kenshin, why is it that you---the ‘core’ personality---are more important than the rest of us?”

“Because I’m real,” Ken replied with a fearsome sort of surety. “And you’re not.”

“How do you know that? Who are you to say that this is my life, and you’re the interloper? Weasel your way out of that one, will you?”

“Bastard,” Ken hissed again. “I know who I am! I remember how it went!”

“Really? Then tell me.”

Like a fragile tower of cards, the yellow house, the couch, and the baby disappeared with a snap; the shadows reared up like monolithic beasts, encompassing a tall, squared ceiling high above, and a cleared out, dusty circle below. There were people in this illusion, in this room, in this world, but they were like wax dolls---frozen forever in a single horrified expression, caught in a moment of terror.

Yukishiro Enishi sat languidly atop a pile of shipping crates, idly twirling a handgun around his slender index finger. He was at the top of his form---a terrifying apparition with choppy silver hair, eyes dark enough to hide your soul in, and the lean, elastic musculature of a dancer.

It ran in the family. Plum was a dancer, too: she was the dark swan Odile while another girl was the virgin white princess, dancing and spinning in extreme grace until the white bird flared up and the black swan broke her neck. Plum was the Sugarplum Fairy---the name had always stuck, ever since she graced the Nutcracker stage decked out in stiff taffeta and purple glitter. Plum was the good fairy, and the black swan---Enishi was the sorcerer, the Rat King, the one whose only dancing partner was death.

Enishi gazed around the warehouse as if seeing it for the first time---he purposefully set his blind, icy gaze on each of the dummy people in turn: Akira in the shadows, holding Plum’s arms behind her back as she struggled to come near, Angel, hackles up and gun drawn, zeroed in on Enishi, but unwilling to pull the trigger, and Plum fighting to help, each of her icy tears frozen, breathless, in the air.

This was the place---the moment---Kenshin visited in his nightmares. This is what tormented his soul, what made him wake in sweats and screams---the next thirty seconds, which would radically and irrevocably change his life.

“This,” Enishi said proudly, waving an askance had at the frozen room around him. “Is where it all began, cousin. This moment, so imbedded into your mind, is the moment of insanity, where you, for the first time, lost control of Us. You say you remember how it went, so let’s do it, shall we? Let’s replay it, and see if you win this time.”

“This is a battle I am unable to win,” Ken said shakily, suddenly very aware of the Sakabatou’s weight at his side. It felt more like a lead weight than a weapon he could plausibly use---he had learned long ago he had no weapons against Enishi. “Every night I fight you, and in every dream I lose.”

“And it will never be any different,” Enishi agreed with a nod, catching his gun mid-twirl and leveling it at Kenshin’s head. “Because I am Id, and I win. Always.” He laughed again. “But we’re stuck like this until you die, so humor me, will you? C’mon, Red. You were always good for a go before.”

Ken clutched at the term, feeling like it was a small life preserver of sanity in a raging sea of lunacy. It rang a bell; he remembered it, but it was like a far-off voice he could not hear completely.

“Id---I---I remember---“

“Oh yes, you remember Id,” Enishi drawled, looking bored. He examined his nails with a sigh, as if this whole adventure was becoming dull. “You remember Intro to Psychology in high school, that’s why. I mean, really, I hate to pull from Freud, but it works for our little predicament.

‘I am Id. I am the DID. I am the only part of yourself you can’t control---I am inaccessible, the primal instinct you can never get rid of, despite your happy, puritanical efforts. You see, I want everything---the power, the pleasure, the sex---everything you try to shy away from, because you’re afraid of it.”

“I can’t balance you,” Ken said unsteadily, eyes widening with realization.

“Though you and your little Super-Ego, Rurouni, try,” Enishi agreed. “And, I think it can be said that that is where it all began---your sickness, that is. Because your ‘inner preacher’ can’t keep his mouth shut, you feel insatiable guilt and shamefor all the bad, bad things you’ve done. Your problem, cousin, is that you have all the justice and cosmic goodness battling ultimate evil in that cute little head of yours, and it tears you apart.”

“I always lose,” Ken whimpered, taking a step back.

“Exactly. Being caught in the middle’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Leave me---leave me be---“

“Oh no,” Enishi laughed, vaulting to his feet with all the grace and surety of the big cat he resembled. He advanced on Kenshin, catching him by the wrist and pulling sharply; Ken stumbled forward, the awkward saya of the Sakabatou banging against his leg. He felt as if he were made of jelly; he tried to move away, tried to mentally force back these visions, but it was like beating back a tiger with a pussy willow branch.

This tiger’s slitted blue eyes taunted him.

To the Id, there was nothing funnier than the weak little ego, trapped in an eternal battle he couldn’t even fight in.

“Tell me how it goes, Kenshin,” Enishi whispered hoarsely, cocking his handgun with a metallic click. He slammed Ken to his knees, one claw-like hand biting into his thin shoulder as he shoved the gun to his throat, trying to squash his flickering pulse. He forced Ken to look up at him, hating what he saw kneeling before him, and yet needing it. Enishi hated Ken, and yet couldn’t live without him---it was a toxic exchange that damned them both. “Tell me how it ends.”

The shadowy, frozen wax dolls came to life. Plum’s tears started falling, Angel’s cat-shriek of a shout abruptly arced in crescendo, and suddenly Ken was nineteen again, fighting for his kidnapped cousin while her lover looked on.

This was the final moment of Ken’s true life. This is where it all began, and where it would all end, if he were to fight.

But Kenshin did not want to fight. It only brought pain, again and again...

“I don’t know how it ends, ‘Nishi,” Ken wheezed, fighting to breathe past his crushing throat. His vision wavered; Plum and Angel looked like dark wisps of smoke, sure to blow away at any moment. “I don’t think it’ll ever end.”

“Precisely,” said Enishi, his hazy eyes dark and dangerous. He trembled with rage, teeth bared like an insane white tiger.

White tiger, red tiger.

Wasn’t that how it’d always been?

“KENSHIN!” Plum screamed, her voice cracking. She roiled and kicked in Akira’s hold, putting up an impressive fight for a very pregnant woman. “DO IT! FIGHT HIM! YOU CAN BEAT HIM!”

“A real sweetheart, isn’t she?” Enishi growled, his intonation on sweetheart akin to whore, or bitch. It was not a nice word, the way he said it, and his grating voice made it all the more the insult. How could a man who professed to love his sister as Enishi loved Tomoe treat her in such a way? Maybe it was, after all, not that Enishi loved Tomoe, but he loved what Kenshin had in her. And that is where the hatred first came from...the love that Kenshin had which he was denied...perhaps that was the first step in creating the madman who was Enishi Yukishiro.

“Kenshin!” Plum cried, sagging. She started sobbing...but Ken didn’t remember that part...he didn’t remember her ever saying anything before, actually...

“Who are you, to puppet Us?” Enishi hissed, grinding his long fingers into Ken’s shoulder. “Who are you to make us stand in line and quietly do as you bid?!”

“I am...” Ken croaked, swaying. “I am Himura Kenshin.”

“That means nothing here!” Enishi barked. “You are nothing!”

And Kenshin believed him.

Enishi was Id, and Id was right.

The little ego was eternally damned from all sides; this lost battle meant no more than the battles before it had. Ken would have closed his eyes and waited for the shot had there not been a voice; a familiar voice, but one not cracked in pain and sorrow.

“Get up, Kenshin,” Tomoe said softly, a hand on his other shoulder. She felt cool and soft, as oppose to the rough and crackling anger of her brother. Ken did not dare look behind him, because he knew this was surreal---the “real” Plum was still being detained by Akira, sobbing his name hysterically and irrationally, a fatally broken record. Either this was his imagination...or she was one of the Others...

Which meant everything and nothing at the same time.

“Get up,” she repeated, gentle and soft. Tomoe had this quiet composure about her, and rarely raised her voice unless it was in laughter. She was cold and serious, now, and imposing in her own right. Her vastly dark eyes told nothing; they were as blind as Enishi’s, both mirror-like and vast.

Enishi’s eyes spat fire; his grip on Ken tightened, and a sweaty finger hovered over the trigger.

“Get out of the way, sister!” Enishi shrieked, at this point completely past being rational. “I will shoot you both if you don’t move, just like before!”

“Your gun means nothing here, Enishi,” Tomoe said calmly---and just like that, the gun was no more than smoke and mirage, wafting away darkly between Enishi’s trembling fingers. “And you mean nothing without Kenshin. Leave us be, brother.”

Enishi howled like an angry cat, throwing Ken away. He hunched over, drawing away, the warehouse, Plum, Akira, and Angel disappearing with him. All that was left in his wake was darkness---darkness which Tomoe only melted into, her eyes and hair just matching the depth of night.

She looked like a ghost. Maybe she was one.

Ken drew in on himself, shuddering. Tomoe’s touch had made him cold, and his confusion kept him that way. This was dreamlike in that these sets of “dreams” only dribbled together, strange and disjointed, without having any real meaning. It was nightmarish in that he couldn’t seem to make it stop, like a merry-go-round that only made him dizzier and dizzier without ever letting him off. Nothing made sense.

“I don’t understand...” Ken whispered, feeling as if he was falling---falling into the darkness without anything tangible to grab hold of. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you much that you’ll understand,” Tomoe admitted. She brushed the messy red hair from Ken’s puzzled eyes, smiling gently. “Enishi will be back, and he will want to fight again. That’s simply his nature. But I have a lot of things to tell you, and you have to do your best to keep your mind open. Can you do that for me, Kenny?”

Ken nodded, feeling as if he was ten again, tagging after his beloved older ‘sister’.

“Good,” Tomoe said, sounding genuinely relieved. “Do you understand what’s happening?”

“No,” Ken replied, sighing. “I just...fell asleep, and...”

“You’re fighting, Kenshin, against a coma. In the real world, your caretakers have decided to wean you from the heavy dosage of medication you’ve been on. You’re in counseling, and it’s helped dramatically.” Tomoe squeezed his hand. There were tears in her dark eyes, like mist on a tarnished mirror. “You’re getting better.”

“...a coma?” he asked shakily, trying vainly to push his thoughts backwards, into the night before. Kaoru was out of the hospital, he hadn’t heard yet from Sano, and Angel was being just as cryptic as ever...but...he didn’t remember a coma, or anything that might have induced such a thing.

“Yes,” Tomoe said. “So you have to fight it. This---none of this---is real, and you know that. A part of you has always known that, I think.”

“But Kaoru---“

“Kaoru is out there, waiting for you,” Tomoe assured him. She enveloped him in a hug, and truly started crying. “I’m gone, Kenny. You have to let go of me, and go to her. Sano’s finally found love, and is waiting for you, too. And Angel---“her voice faltered, wavering. She had to blink back tears before going on. “---could you make sure Angel’s happy?”

“I will,” Ken said. “But how do I get away from Enishi? None of this makes sense---“

“Just refuse to fight him. He only has the power that you yourself have given him. If you take the fear from him, you will be the stronger aspect, and you will win.”

Tomoe gave him a final embrace, burying her face in his neck and breathing deeply the scent of him.

Ken knew this was a kind of dream. This was not the reality he knew, where there was Kaoru, Sano, Azrael, and everybody else who meant everything to him. In his mind, he knew that this Tomoe---this Tomoe that lived on as a dream---was more of his own wishes and a piece of his mind; she was a tangle of loss and loneliness that he had always held since he let go of her cooling hand in the hospital ICU.

“You have to let me go,” she whispered shakily. “You and Angel---you have to let me go, and move on. Tell her that. Wake up, and move on. You can’t keep living here.”

“Wake up?” Kenshin asked, opening his eyes.

And all he saw was stabbing light. He felt as if he was being crushed, and he cried out, reaching for Plum---but she was gone again, the mist of his imagination.

He blinked against the terrifyingly bright light, convulsed on his side, and screamed.

“Hold him down!” someone yelled---someone deep and masculine, but not Sano, Hiko, or any other male voice he had on mental register. “He’s coming to; hold him down!”

“I need two milligrams lorazepam IV and a four-point restraint!”

“Hold him down! He’s going to hurt himself!”

“Calm down, Kenshin, calm down!”

But he couldn’t calm down. This was not his apartment, this was not the school, this was not the beach house, this was not Never-Never Land, this was not the dojo, the warehouse, or even the darkness---this is the one place he never wanted to go to again, the place the Others fought tooth and nail against---

This was a bright place. This was white, and it was as strange as an alien terrain---and yet, terribly familiar at the same time. There were hands all over him, an alien army holding him down and forcing him into submission yet again---

Kenshin screamed again, bucking against the hands. One by one, each limb was pinned and strapped down; the buckles bit into his skin and he writhed. There was a sharp pain in his arm, the kiss of a hypodermic needle, and everything seemed to slow down, syrupy.

Ken stopped moving. He stopped fighting, just as he always did, because this was yet another losing battle. He stilled as the haze of the drug started to take effect; he breathed slowly, acutely feeling the sensation of his own breathing as if he had never noticed it before. He felt unexpectedly light and cold: his face and neck felt bare, and he realized that someone had sheared his red hair down to several inches. The thin white hospital garb he was wearing did nothing to alleviate the cold that was seeping down to his very bones, and he shivered involuntarily against it.

“You’re okay, Kenshin,” said a soothing balm of a voice---a voice he tried to grab at, tried to grasp as the only sliver of reality he could hold onto, but he was tied down. Ken wanted to cry out her name, but it was difficult, and stuck in his throat. “Nobody will hurt you here, Kenshin; you’ve just woken up after a very, very long time...”

I know! He wanted to scream. I woke up to beat Enishi; I woke up to find you again, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m---

Kenshin opened his eyes, margin by margin, until he could see everything about him. The light was not so terrible as it had been at first, and he could just make out the haze of faces around him---familiar faces, though somehow warped, as though seen through a peculiar filter.

He saw Angel, first. She was standing by the doorway, the harsh florescent light making her as black and white as the heroine in an old-time movie and giving her a rather fitting halo. Her expression was unreadable, but there was a sort of triumph in her eyes. He didn’t know what battle she had won, or what wars she had waged during his sleep, but the rigid, proud tilt of her chin outlined warrior across her brow. Still, though, her nose was smudged with orange paint. He wanted to laugh at the clownish irony of the painted heroine, but the laughter got stuck right behind every other word he had wanted to cry.

There were two men bookending Angel: a tall, dark-haired man who could have been her brother in looks alone, and a slightly shorter man with tousled brown hair and dusky eyes. In his arms, he held a frightened little girl with night-dark hair and eye darker still, mirroring the face of the woman Kenshin had just left. She burrowed her pale, child-round face into the man’s oxford shirt, whimpering softly. Kenshin looked away from them.

Slowly, he recognized another face, and another---Uncle Hiko, just as broad and formidable as ever, and Sano, white-faced and stricken. His hulking old friend mouthed “Hey, Sleeping Beauty”, but his expression did not carry the same joking as did his words. His eyes looked old---an age which did not belong to Sano in the least.

There was a nurse hovering beside him, nervously brushing her sheared black hair behind her ears...

He knew it was Kaoru. He knew, because he could feel it, although she looked different---her eyes were darker than he remembered them, her shorter black hair just brushing her soft chin, and her narrow face more Asian; beneath that, though, lay everything he had come to love. The kindness, the beauty, the childishness, even. He knew, and it hurt.

There were doctors, too, and brutish men who had no doubt strapped him here, but they suddenly meant nothing. He felt as if he was dreaming, but it was too sharp and real and terrifying to be a dream.

“Kenshin,” said the Kaoru Who Was Not His, her deep blue eyes full of a maturity he hardly recognized. “Nobody will hurt you here. You’re at the Salem medical institute. I’m your aide, Kaoru Kamiya. You’ve been in a coma for months, now, and we were really worried about you. How are you doing?”

Kenshin did not know how to answer. He did not know how to explain to these people---these...strangers---that he had just been pulled into the mires of a horrible nightmare. He did not know if he could ask them to allow him to sleep again, where he would return to the medicated world of a small apartment and a broken love, if he even had it in him to go back. He did not know if the words would come if he tried to answer, because there was nothing but emptiness left in his chest, and a void where reality had formally lodged itself. There was nothing here but a light he hardly remembered or understood, and faces that meant even less.

Kenshin did not answer.

He curled on his side and started to cry for everything he had lost in waking up.

The truth did not seem worth this pain.

This is not where it ended. This, in fact, was where it truly began, if such could be imagined, because there was a lot of confusion and a lot of illusion that had to be pared away before Kenshin could fully understand what had happened to him. This was done with a great deal of patience and many kind words---mostly, the aide who had been assigned to him, a Ms. Kaoru Kamiya, told him of what had occurred while he was in a comatose state.

It all had began with Enishi and Plum, as Kenshin had always knew. The terrible moment of Tomoe Yukishiro’s death had triggered a cataclysmic breakdown in Kenshin’s mental state; he had lapsed into a terrifying psychotic episode. Some would say this then resulted in the brutal murder of Akira Kiyosato, one of the perpetrators of Tomoe’s own murder, but the evidence that aligned Kenshin Himura as the killer had been lost in a small office fire. The blame game became decidedly muddled from this point on, and the rest of the story depended on who was telling it.

Kenshin was told he had checked himself into the Institute just following the murder. He had been seventeen at his time of check-in. He had apologized profusely, and had then refused to talk to anyone---family and doctors alike---for several months. Some of the doctors said he had had prolonged episodes at this point, or that he had not mentally returned from the Kiyosato episode altogether.

There were brief moments where the ‘Kenshin’ personality resurfaced, but they were short and panicked visits of sanity. After two such lapses back into the real world, the worried doctors had upped his medication in an effort to pull back the main personality---

---to a fatal effect.

Just after his eighteenth birthday, Kenshin Himura went into a coma. He stayed in this state for nearly four years, as the doctors had been unwilling to repeal the medication, for fear of further compounding the condition Kenshin was in. There was no telling if he was irreparably lost---if the incident at Tomoe Yukishiro’s death had, truly, been the undoing of Kenshin, it was likely that there was nothing left of him to bring back to life.

But there were those who still believed, as is always the case. Kenshin had left ‘family’ in the waking world before lapsing into a coma---he had left Azrael Tonbo and Sanosuke Sagara, the two people in the world who loved him best. They had not stopped living after Kenshin left; in fact, their lives had never even lagged.

Sano had met stardom---to his own dismay---as a drummer in a rock band currently twelfth on the chart. Twelfth was a good number for Sano, because he really wasn’t one to be famous. He didn’t want fame, because he had his own secrets---a dying best friend whom he never abandoned in Salem, and a ‘wife’ the public wasn’t allowed to know about. Azrael ‘Angel’ Tonbo had stepped down out of her job in law enforcement, and had taken time to be with her ‘family’---the gay couple she had befriended on a job many years before, and the little girl the three of them raised together. The couple had tried multiple times to convince Angel to move back east with them, but she had always refused on the grounds that she had someone important to watch over in Salem.

That was just the way of things. Kenshin was just the sort of person who was impossible to let go of; there was nothing under heaven or earth that could make Angel or Sano leave him indefinitely. They visited. At least once a week, the two of them would come in and talk to their lost old friend about all that he was missing---Sano’s unexpected rise to stardom, and his equally unexpected romance with his manager, a flamboyant drag queen named Kamatari; Angel’s strange, yet loving, new family...heartened by the loyalty of his friends, Kaoru Kamiya, his nurse, sometimes joined in and talked to him, too. She seemed to have a special gentleness associated with this patient.

The four years of his coma were tiring, and hope was nothing more than a word between them, but they knew---they knew that Kenshin was the type to fight.

They knew that Kenshin would fight with and against his condition, because he was, at heart, a warrior.

It was just his way.

When we fought, Enishi asked me how it ended. I told him I didn’t know how our hellish encounters would end, because I never thought they would---I was certain that the battle between me, the ‘Ego’ (as Freud would have it), Rurouni, the ‘Super Ego’, and Enishi, the ‘Id’, would last on into eternity. I never thought that this main battle---perhaps the battle for my soul, as it was---would somehow break its own cycle with me rebelling just the once, with Plum’s help.

Well, I was right, in a way. The battle never ends. I’m still a very sick person, and nothing anyone does or says can alleviate that. I’ll never fully heal, but I have become stronger, and I have ways to cope, now. I have weapons that aid me in my timeless battle---as timeless as good versus evil.

My counselor once said that I’m the physical embodiment of the universe. I am good, I am evil, and I am everything caught hopelessly in between.

That’s how this ends. My brief encounter with ‘Id’ was not my last one, nor were the outcomes of the other battles different from that first major one. I’d fight this ghost of Enishi I’d created until my own death---he was an interloper in my dreams and a villain in my nightmares, always hiding behind every door, around every corner.

But you know what? Plum was right. Without fear, he wasn’t my enemy anymore, because he only had the power I gave him. In fact, he became less of my enemy and more of an annoyance from the life I led as a part-time crisis youth counselor and a stay-at-home dad.

Uh-huh. You heard right. Dad.

See, maybe the world I had created in my coma was less of a dream and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe the voices I heard on the Other Side had an effect as to what I created upon release.

Or maybe Kaoru and I were just meant for each other.

Heh. You never know. Life’s just funny like that.

If you wanted to, you could say we lived happily ever after. Of course there were other hardships, because no life is complete without the necessary dosage of strife and chaos, right? But you could say...you could say my second life ended gently enough. You could say I got my happy ending through Kenji and Kaoru, though sometimes I’d be lost to the Others. I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ll say that there were other adventures. But yeah. If nothing else, I can say I was happy.

And, finally, I was given a little but of control, and a little bit of rest.

Kaoru said once---she said that I reminded her of Odysseus. This Kaoru---my Kaoru---has a love of literature that bled through into my coma-world; I assume that her reading aloud of early literature like Beowulf, The Illiad, and Edmund Spenser’s Thee Faerie Queene equated my thinking of her as an English teacher.

Anyway. When I was about midway through my recovery, she plopped down a copy of Homer’s The Odyssey into my lap and told me to read it. I did, though I was dubious about the writing abilities of a blind Greek guy. Yes, I read it, and enjoyed it a bit, too, even though it was definitely ‘mental fiber’.

After I finished, Kaoru told me that I was a modern-day Odysseus. The Odyssey is this insane story about Odysseus, a brave and courageous Greek man who went off to fight the Trojan war. He lived through the war as a hero, and, morale high, set off back home to see his beautiful wife, Penelope, and their baby son, Telemachus. It took years upon years, and Odysseus was tortured, beguiled, and nearly eaten at several occasions. He went through hell and high water---absolutely literally---and after this journey, where he lost friend after friend, he returned to find everything he had known drastically different, as if a totally different world.

I agreed with her when she said that. I suppose I was like Odysseus, and this coma was my grand, eventful, and terrible Odyssey.

But it drew to a close, and, like Odysseus, I managed to get my life back.

And we all lived happily ever after.

...I honestly don’t know where to start with this rant, so I’ll skip it for now. This is not really the end quite yet, because I’m putting up an “Epilogue” that explains a bit about what happened to everyone in the end of it all. Expect that later this week. I think I’ll put up the “Final Endnote”, where I explain my spastic train of thought behind this story, then.

AND GUESS WHAT? DANCING PLUMS HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR SEVERAL OF THE RUROUNI KENSHIN READER’S CHOICE AWARDS!! (and I was nominated for Author of the Year...gah, who knows how that happened...) SHOW YOUR SUPPORT AND LOVE OF ALL THAT IS IMBRI BY VOTING FOR DP! VOTE IF YOU LOVE DP---or vote if you don’t love DP, but you just want to make me feel good about myself and my lacking skills. That works, too.

And hey, if you’ve never reviewed before, do it now!! I’d like to see who all reads this godawfully long story for goodness’ sakes! Please, give me a final review on how you like/dislike the ending! Pleeeeease!

Imbri