[Rurouni Kenshin] Vaster Than Empires

[rampantrecs]

Title: Vaster Than Empires
Author: Ayezur
Fandom: Rurouni Kenshin
Rating: T
Story Links: AO3 | FFnet | tumblr
Author Links: AO3 | FFnet | tumblr
Summary: AU. Early summer, 1601. The Western Army is defeated; the country stands, uneasy, under the hand of the Tokugawa. Kaoru Kamiya, whose family was on the losing side, has been sold into marriage for the sake of peace. Her new husband is a legend, a demon bound in human form, marked by his blood-lust and his bright red hair. However, legends have a way of being not exactly... true.

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The day of her wedding dawned soft and grey. Kaoru refused her breakfast and sat on the porch outside her room, watching the mist rise from the courtyard garden. Her father had designed a garden for her mother, long before she was born, planting every sprout and sapling with his own hands. Even after her death he had never suffered another to tend it, and her last memory of him was this: her father standing at the edge of the shallow pond under the maple tree, and the leaves drifting down like bloody snow.

Our lives do not belong to us, Kaoru, he’d told her, breaking off a single slender twig and handing it to her. You know that.

But why do you have to go? she’d wanted to ask. A child’s question, when she was no longer a child. Should he stay, and watch his brothers and cousins send their sons to die? Such a thing was unconscionable. So he had gone to war, and she’d placed the twig and the leaf that clung to it on the family altar, praying that he would return.
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Reccer's Notes: If you're looking for Kaoru being badass- with or without her bokken- you are very much in the right place.