I'll stay a while...

Fourteen years. He has carried the burden of my death for fourteen years. It is so difficult to conceptualize that phrase. It is over half the time I’ve been alive… I can’t even comprehend the distance between us now. He is so very different and yet completely the same… He is taller. Older. Fine lines around his eyes though they are so faint that he still looks ten years younger than he actually is. He has wandered since the end of the war, never settling anywhere for any length of time, trying to atone for the lives he took during the war. They call it bakumatsu now… the end of the bafuku…

Katsura Kogoro came to him personally not long after my death. The traitor amongst us had been Isuka. I always disliked that man from the beginning. I wish I could say that I am surprised by the news. Katsura apologized for what he did and admitted that Kenshin should never have been a hitokiri. He brought Kenshin out of the shadows to protect the rebel forces in the open. He became a nightmare legend in the streets of Kyoto and Hitokiri Battousai became known as well as any of the Shinsengumi captains... Kenshin agreed to go with Katsura with the understanding that when the fighting was done he was done as well. That he would keep the promise he made to me the night before I died. To find a way to protect without killing and to find a way to atone for the lives he had taken for the new era.

He fought on the front lines for four years until the Battle of Toba Fushimi in 1868. His answer was given to him by the master swordsmith Arai Shakku in the form of a sakabatou... a reverse-blade sword. He has carried it for ten years, wandering Japan and trying to find a way to atone for the lives he took to bring in the Meiji Era.

Just as he promised.

Still… I cannot help but think of how lonely this life must have been. To have no one. No home. Nothing but that ever-present remorse. He tries to hide it, but I can see it. Perhaps it fools others, but I see through it. Even as he smiles his eyes are haunted. Even this isn’t so different. When we first met he hid it behind a scowl and now he deflects…

I don’t know what to do now, with this man who was my husband, who is so far away from me. And likewise he doesn’t know what to do with me. I am a walking ghost, dredged up from nearly a decade and a half ago. I see the way he looks at me when he doesn’t think I see. Haunted. A waking nightmare, a walking reminder of his greatest sin. There is relief as well, joy that I am alive here, but that doesn’t undo what happened.

And of my betrayal, he says nothing. My pleas for forgiveness are met with ‘there is nothing to forgive’. But how can that be? I deceived him from the very beginning. And yet there is nothing to forgive… Perhaps I want him to be angry with me… to reflect my anger and disgust with myself. I don’t know.