From: Jan Story [janstory@mailhost.det.ameritech.net]
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 1999 10:55 AM
To: kffdisc@onelist.com
Subject: Teruterubouzu (final)

This is the final version of the "Tanabata Special" I posted last month.  A few minor tweaks, a spelling error corrected, and now it's ready to go out into the big wide world!


TERUTERUBOUZU
A Rurouni Kenshin Fanfiction by Jan Story
All characters (c) Nobuhiro Watsuki, Shueisha, Sony etc.


The summer she was six, she pestered us all for days demanding to know if it was going to rain for the Tanabata festival. Finally Okon got sick of it and taught her how to make teruterubouzu. She filled up a whole basket of them, one for every window in the house except mine. Then she handed me the "special" one. It was dark blue, cut from a kimono she'd torn climbing trees. "I want the sun to shine for you specially, Aoshi-niichan," she told me.

The sun did shine, for all of us - but then it did, back then. Before the world changed. Before I... Hannya wore one of his disguises and went to that festival with us. The old Okashira pretended to ignore the way Okon was flirting with me, and Misao rode on Shikijou's shoulders, laughing to be up so high...

That was one of the last happy times. Not long after that, the old man died, and they made me Okashira - me, a boy of fifteen, commanding men two and three times my age. There was no more flirting and fumbling in corners with Okon after that; an Okashira can't be seen to have favorites. Maybe someone older, but I was too young, too unsure of my authority. Tokyo was getting dangerous, with too many diehard Bakufu supporters protesting the new Meiji government, so I sent Misao to stay with Okina at our base in Kyoto. 

She never called me niichan again, only sama.

I don't remember her making teruterubouzu again either. But she's making them now. A whole basket of them, little white balls with faces on them, to hang in the Shin-Aoiya's windows. To make sure the sun will shine on Tanabata. So the birds will fly, and Orihime and Kengyu can meet. It's strange that Misao should be so serious about this; she is always so disdainful of ordinary girls and their preoccupation with love...

I watch as she shapes one of the little charms, picks up her brush and paints a suggestion of a face on it. Big round eyes, a mouth open in surprise... she pauses, thinking, and then adds two more quick brush strokes. With the addition of a cross on its cheek, the teruterubouzu becomes Himura, with that deceptively idiotic expression he gets when something surprises him. Then I notice that all the charms have something recognizable about them. Okina's beard, Kuro's jowls, Okon's flirtatious smile. And one with an expressionless mouth and slashes of black ink over its eyes and down its cheeks. Me, I suppose. 

She picks up another