Title: Succession
Author: JC Sun
Rating: Most congenially G; abnormally sensitive, PG. References and general spoilers to Kyoto pre-arc.

Summary: That man of international fashion and his baka no deishi.

*

I remember when I told the baka deishi that I had killed my sensei.

"I'm not going to kill you." he said, with all the firmness and innocence only he could have, as if he had a choice.

I laughed him.

The murder of your sensei has nothing to do with some inflated sense of drama, and everything to do with the evolution. In order to become Hiko Sejyruu, you have to be better than the Hiko before you and he had to have been better than his Hiko--techniques, the founder was the best, and he isn't ever matched by any of his followers; the technique decays. But with Mitsuragi Ryu, my sensei was better than his sensei, I am most definitely better than my sensei, but Kenshin being better than me--

That remains to be seen.

As a man of twenty six, he isn't as strong as he was as a boy of fourteen. Inactivity has dulled his reflexes, loosened his muscles--if this is godspeed, then God must have sprained his ankle, God must be on crutches. Hell. I can go faster than does, and I'm an old man of forty two.

You'll never hear me admit that to anyone else.

Old--

You'd never know it to look at me, and I don't want to admit it, but my bones ache: too much sake, too many old fights, too many bruises and cuts and old bones that just won't set right in the damp air. I wake up some mornings, and I'm actually hung over from the night before. Pathetic. My shoulders are aching, my head is aching, my mouth feels like I've been gnawing on termite-infested wood, and I've got to struggle to get this cape on.

Goddamn mantle. You want melodrama? Here's eighty pounds of it. It was my sensei's final revenge, making me wear it, and the first couple years I wore it, I felt like I was moving underwater and hated it. Makes you slow, makes you deliberate and predictable so that in a real fight with a real master, you're pretty much toast, but after so many years, I can't take it off. My body's used to it, I over compensate when I'm not wearing it. Tip over and fall flat on this gorgeous face.

Getting old, I suppose.

Kenshin's getting old too. It's in his eyes, he knows that pretty soon those old wounds are going to catch up to him. One of these days, sooner rather than later, he's going to do something stupid, get wounded, and never get better, just this long, lapsing convalescence until he comes to his senses and puts himself out of his crippled misery.

Me, I'll live into ripe old age, drinking sake and instructing whatever big-eyed orphan I pick up to be the successor, since I'm fairly sure that I'll end up killing Kenshin or he'll refuse to kill me, and if I make him successor, that'll be four hundred years of tradition straight out of the window.

Big-eyed orphans--that's a tradition in and of itself. I was one, and my sensei was one, though he says that his sensei's sensei wasn't one, that his parents had lived in a nearby village and had sent their son to him when that he asked because they just didn't want the useless thing, because they were poor and he was willing to pay good money for their baby.

So, the successors have all been orphans, in a sense, and Hiten Mitsuragi Ryu was the only thing they had left--learn it or go starve on the streets. We had to be desperate. You shave to be desperate enough to go off with some crazy man in an ugly mantle, live up on a mountain, and train like a mad beast for ten or fifteen years, then kill the only man you know.

When he taught me the succession technique, Sensei was very pragmatic. "Come and try it on me. You probably won't be able to do it anyway, and I'll end up killing you, so hurry up. I don't have all day, baka deshi."

Baka deshi. That's another tradition.

Teaching the deshi to cook is third. When he turned eleven, I told Kenshin that "You're not going to get married and have a wife to do it for you, so you might as well learn to do it now. You'll never be as good as I am, of course, but at least you won't starve to death."

Yes, there was Tomoe, but that marriage didn't exactly last, did it? And of course I know about Tomoe. There was a nice, tidy scandal about it, all printed up in the papers since it had all the details of a best seller--the Ishin Shishi leaders actually made it sound like a good thing, that it was proof of their men's abilities. The devotion of their men to the new order, the fire of revolution: so on and so forth.

When Kenshin goes back to Kyoto, no doubt he's going to blubber like a baby over her grave. Bring it flowers, plant a tree or two and do everything up to and including go down on his knees and beat his chest in remorse. Ten years, and she's still under his skin. . .

She and this other look-a-like are probably at the root of this new desire to learn the technique. Defending his woman from stupid incursion or the other. . . The year before Kenshin left, the village girls really started to notice him on his trips to the village for sake and food, and I'm fairly certain he lost his virginity to this one particularly determined and pretty farmer's daughter. He was utterly infatutated with her, walked around even more moony eyed than he usually is. . . until a group of some faction came through the village, discovered her brother was working for another faction and killed her entire family in the name of maintaining political unity. They also took some liberties with the women, so I hear, before they slit their throats, and as revenge, Kenshin tracked the entire unit to another village where they were performing another act of political unity and killed them where they stood.

He came back to me the next morning with a strange, exalted look in his eyes. While I was binding his wounds, he turned to me and said, "Sensei, I think I know what I'm supposed to do with my life."

"To get yourself chopped into mincemeat so that I have to waste my time putting you back together?"

"To protect people."

"Bah. I could have told you that. If you'd listened to me, baka, you'd have known that was your destiny years ago instead of finally figuring it out."

"I've always known that I wanted to protect people, but now, I know I can do it. Some of those villagers are still alive, they're not dead because I managed to stop those soldiers." His eyes practically glowed at me, and I snarled,

"Stop fidgeting. You fidget when you're talking, and I can't get the bandage on if you're wriggling around like a worm." When he opened his mouth to protest, I told him to be quiet.

That was the end of that particular conversation though he left me three months after that.

And now he's back to learn the succession technique.

We're both getting old.

"If you don't scratch me this time, I'm going to kill you."

*

end.

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