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May All Be Pain or Love	By : Skwishee Category: > Kyo/Kaoru Views: 5672 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the members of Dir en grey. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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AH! Hi! It's been awhile since I finished Midnight Butterfly and started on this hasn't it? Oh well, it's up now. This story is from Kaoru's POV and is based after a long ass dream that I had. I know the first couple chapters are kinda slow, but it gets much better I assure you.

Disclaimer as usual. I don't own Dir en grey, Sun Krad, Free Will and their mothers do. Don't sue me. This isn't real. I have no money and this is entirely non-profit XD and is FICTION. Thank you.

Thank you so much to my awesome Beta reader, Julia. I LOVE YOU! you are a godsend.

Author's Notes: Before you read let me tell you that there may be a few words that you may not know. For this chapter these are:
Kappa: A water demon. Mischievious and kind of volatile. These demons have a water fount on the top of their head and can only
be rendered helpless by using their extreme sense of etiquette against them. By bowing to them they are forced to bow
back. This results in them spilling the water out of the top of their heads and losing all their power. You can also
befriend a kappa by giving them cucumbers. Their favorite food. A kappa is a very useful ally.
Miyamoto: Yes, I am well aware that this is not Kyo's last name. But it was a false name that he gave in an old interview and since
there really was a Miyamoto clan in this time period I went with it.
Dai: Spelling his name 'Die' in this time period would be incorrect.
geiko: Kyoto geisha specifically.
Karyukai: What the geisha call Gion Kobu. Translates to : "flower and willow world"

Now, Enjoy and PLEASE Read and Review. I may not post the other chapters if you don't ^_~

Prologue

The winter was white and silent. A paling cast on a modest little courtyard. Ice kisses on the cherry trees, a frozen mirror in the ground, koi caught forever in suspended animation, their joyless tomb in the water. This winter came fast, dooming this small garden to an existence of dead time and chilling silence.
I mourned bitterly for the sakura blossoms, that —as I had remembered — had only just begun to fall when this white wind came and took them away from their branches with a swiftness...most unnatural. But still they stay in my mind. Not an easy thing to forget when such a simple thing as a flower ignites an inferno of vagrant memories. Blossoms caught in fluxes of gold as my lover lay sleeping under the trees. I remember staring up at them as the colors drifted down, riding the wind to where we lay, like a brocade of pink and white. A silk blanket for a sleeping dragon.
Ah, but perhaps I am being too poetic? I apologize. It's not like me. You see, he is the better with words. The better poet I suppose. When I look at this iridescent kingdom I hear his voice. Yet though he is not far away, I know he isn't speaking. Curled in his blanket on the tatami, sleeping in silence.

o o o

Before I take this any further, let me tell you how this all came to be; this swift passing of the years, this horribly silent winter. Back when I was a child of five or six — and had never so much as had the thought cross my mind of becoming a samurai or keeping a master — I had been removed from my small province of Hyougo to the far larger, and then capital, Kyoto. Kyoto was, after all, a paradise of business for my father whom was a very talented painter of textiles for high-end kimono. But, as Hyougo was very very poor and not such a prudent place of business for any artisan, he took my mother and I and we came to stay with my grandmother in Kyoto.

I was far too young to understand the reasoning behind the move. I only knew that I could barely remember having seen my grandmother at all before and was mortified at the thought of going to live with a person I knew so very little about. However, as luck would have it, the second I saw her, I loved her.

To say she was eccentric would be a slight understatement, though it discredited her none. My father complained that she had lost her mind when my grandfather died two years before. If you had asked my opinion on the matter I would have told you that I thought her mind was still firmly with her and still very sound. Still, I could see where people might've gotten the idea that she was a little cracked, because more often than naught, you would find her making herself comfortable in one strange place or another.

Strange for a person, I expect, not for worms or insects or anything that made its home in the ground. She was a very spiritual person, very admiring of the earth and the things the gods had created. She loved to lay in the garden staring up at the nights sky or sit down by the river under the old drum bridge and talk to fish and frogs and whatever else managed to climb up the muddy banks to see what the strange old creature was. She named nearly every creature she met and would write their names in a rough little book that she always carried with her. Funny that this was also the way in which I had been taught to read and write.

"Things ought to have a proper name" she would tell me. "It keeps them apart from the dead things and the forgotten things that no one ever cared about." I suppose it made some sort of sense in the end, but it made sense to her always and that's what really mattered. It was just these little quirks of hers that made me treasure her company more than any other person alive.

Also, she was entirely too amorous for a woman of her age, so said my father, and made it her business to court the man named Somura that lived just around the corner. He was 76 and the hair on the top of his head was very thin, but as you looked down his face it grew thicker and thicker until I had just assumed the strands on his chin had fought with the ones on his head and had yanked them downward.

Sometimes I would sneak out of the house late at night and find her down by the bridge since it was only several yards from our back door. She'd be sitting with her feet in the water, smiling to nothing in particular and when I'd come she'd pull me in her lap and tell me a story, her sweet smell of mint leaves lulling me to relax in her arms.

On one of these nights she told me one very specific story. This would impact on me in a way that nothing else could ever compare to. The story, as it was told to me on one dusky summer night, was a provincial legend. As legends go it was actually rather ordinary, telling of a great demon, a dragon, who had taken the guise of a human woman and fell in love with a wandering samurai. I imagine you are already guessing the rest. A little child of both breeds was born and thus began an age of merging families and dereliction of the half demon monstrosity.

And of course, said my grandmother, 'It was in this very place. Where the Aomori shrine is, just beyond Kiyomizu temple. Right in Kyoto.' The story was only of moderate interest to me. Stories of love don't often inspire little boys. I did like the idea of dragons though, and demons, which was quite lucky I think, because as curious children go, I was one of the worst. And I somehow got the strange notion in me to go and see this place for myself.

I can't say what I was expecting to see exactly, but I was so fascinated by demonic legend that I would have done anything to see one for myself. I remember once I had stood in a river bed for four hours, a cucumber in my hand, hoping that maybe a kappa would come and see me and that I could get him to do whatever I wanted. Which at that point in time was probably evening the score between me and the ten year old neighbor boy, Ichimura, who kept pushing me in the dirt whenever I walked past his house alone. Well, as it turned out, all that had gotten me was very wet feet and I was in bed sick for three days.

The Aomori shrine had been abandoned for years, and was supposedly in very bad disrepair. One day, when my mother took her afternoon nap, I climbed out my window and went to investigate. I found the shrine, just where obasan had said it would be. Between two giant oak trees near on a mile past the temple in a clearing in the woods. Only...the shrine hadn't been quite as neglected as I had come to imagine. Actually, it wasn't neglected at all. It's high red beams looked as though they were painted only the day before, and the wood was smooth and glossy, not chipped and splintered as the wood on an abandoned shrine should have been.

These musings I pushed to the back of my head and no sooner had I moved the big door aside and taken two steps past the front entrance did I hear the strangest sound I'd ever heard. It seemed almost as if something was sliding around in there, somewhere in the dark, something that sounded like...skin. Wet skin on tatami. And it seemed to be hurrying towards me the further I stepped!

Well, it must have scared me so bad that the second I heard it I went white and turned tail and ran right down the steps back the way I came. But the bottom step had snagged my foot and so I tumbled to the ground and I must have knocked my head against a rock or a log because I went out like a light.

When I came to I was in the big temple, face to face with a bald-headed priest and one of the most unusual children I had ever seen. Ah, but I should say this before I go on: There was a boy in Kyoto, whom I found, was unlike any other. When all the other children, including myself, had black hair, this boy's hair was gold. And as we all had dark eyes, this child had blue. I had heard once from men in town of foreigners from the west, with yellow hair and round eyes, and it had been my first thought to the matter when I first laid eyes on him.

But this child's eyes were most certainly Japanese. His features were both traditional and exotic, and his grasp of the language was as good as my own, despite his thick Kyoto accent. I had no choice then but to believe that, even as rare as he had seemed, he was indeed Japanese. And I had not been able to contain my surprise at seeing him.

I learned then from the monk who tended me that I had slipped and hit my head when I ran from the shrine and I had the nasty gash to prove it. The monk never asked me why I had gone there and I had never told him. The desire to stay out of trouble trumping any shred of honest confession in me. In fact, the only thing I could really remember was a distinctly strange feeling from the inside of it, which I would not feel again for some time. Fear.

As the boy stared at me from under his sharp wisps of pale gold he said a word. 'Kyo'
"What?" I said.
"My name." he said. "My name is Kyo. Weren't you wondering?"
I nodded very slowly so as not to make my head spin any more than it was. I was sure if I had done it as enthusiastically as I wanted it would have flown right off my neck and rolled somewhere towards the other room.
Then he asked for my name. I hadn't realized I had been so rude. Quickly I stuttered out my name in reply.
"Ni...Niikura...Ka...k...Kaoru. Hajimemashite!"

I felt myself go numb looking into those eyes, and where I should have found a great coldness, all I felt was...at ease. Finally, my curiosity won out over my shyness and I managed to say that I had seen him before. The monk interjected before Kyo had the time to answer.

"He lives with us." he said. "We take care of him here in the temple."
"But, don't you have any parents? Aren't they mad?" I asked.
He shook his head sadly and the monk spoke again. "They died." was all he said. "Now he lives here. Kaoru, is it? Won't you stay for awhile and keep him company? He doesn't have many friends and it would be nice if he had someone to talk to."

Eagerly I agreed because I somehow felt that it was him I had been searching for, even though I knew that was quite impossible. Though a voice in my soul seemed to tell me that I had found something far more important than what I had sought. Suddenly my head didn't hurt anymore. And so I stayed...and left...and came back again. Over and over, day after day, enough so that it became an almost daily routine. I would visit him at the temple so often that most days the priests would leave the back passage ways open so that I could come and go as I pleased.

I would race to the back of the temple where Kyo sat and read quietly to himself. He was incredibly smart. Having read everything from philosophy to the arts of war. He knew all the sutras by heart! I only remembered three...Kyo was quiet, except when he was addressing me, and then he was like any other child. Full of energy and enthusiasm and perhaps more than the usual amount of sarcasm.
There was never a moment in my life when I wasn't spellbound by him. I loved him. Oh! But I mentioned a dragon, did I not? Yes, well, that I would later find out, was Miyamoto Kyo. Obasan told it to me, the priests told it to me, even the other children's parents had mumbled about it when I was seemingly out of earshot. This was the child, the half dragon monstrosity. And coincidentally...everything I was looking for the day I fell from that shrine.
Now, as this is an incredibly far fetched tale for some of you to swallow down, I leave it up to you to decide if these accusations were all just superstition, or maybe even the result of some deeper fear of the boy's differences: his blonde hair, his eyes...but I'll tell you one thing. Those eyes...were not human. No matter how any rational explanation would try to tempt me into believing it, they simply were not. Like ice reflecting the moon on a winter night, or the blue core of a flicker of fire and his pupils were daggers. But then again, most never got so close to see them. Kyo walked with his head downcast.
Constantly he was the subject of attack. As you can imagine his differences ostracized him from the other children. Even the adults who should have known better, didn't, and they spoke of him as though he were nothing better than a worm feeding off the crop in their gardens. He didn't deserve it. He was...magnificent.
I was, gratefully, not the only child that saw this allure in him though. There were three others that in time had come to keep our company: Toshiya, Dai and Shinya. The first two were best friends. Toshiya, a pretty little mischief maker and Dai, an awkward comedian. Shinya was their complete opposite. He was quiet and respectful and, much like Kyo, he spoke to very few people. To some his behavior was called 'arrogant' or 'snobbish' but all of those were unfounded.
So it was that we five grew up together and the tale that revolved around Kyo became just another fascinating Kyoto legend. But however wild and improbable some think this story to be, it is very much the truth. I say this because the rumored child, this dragon spawn, lies only rooms away from me. His eyes still shine in the darkness.

o o o

In the year 1633 Miyamoto Kyo had somehow come to singlehandedly control the largest clan of samurai in Kyoto, he was 21. Whether it was his proficiency with a blade that made them swear allegiance to his name, or if it was merely the legend that surrounded him, no one knew. I would've believed it was his charisma, his beauty, if the majority of his samurai had ever seen him clearly. Many had not. Only well acquainted with his voice or his masked figure.
Despite his reclusiveness, Kyo had brought the age of the samurai into great prosperity and Kyoto reaped the benefits. But it wasn't long until new daimyo took to Kyoto's vastly favorable stage and government shogun tired of the samurai's loyalty to the ascetic child of legend who had, in some ways, become more revered by his men than the newly appointed emporer himself.
This, of course, greatly displeased the other daimyo in the province and there had started a rift between them for loyalty, for power and for Kyoto herself.
As for me, I had followed him. Into this life, into this feud. I was his samurai, though I can't recall when I had become one. But it was all of us, not only me, that had stayed at his side. Because we were friends, we were his family, and maybe because we couldn't think of anything we'd rather be doing.
Personally, I really came into my own when I began managing the house. I was quite exceptional in business, finances especially, and our house was the richest in the province. Unfortunately, my common sense evaporated completely around Kyo and all too often I found myself giving in to his whims for extravagant spending. He adored Gion, and almost every week he asked for the best geiko in the karyukai to come and dance and keep company. This was a very expensive habit as it was, and sometimes he would call as many as four or five of Kyoto's finest geiko to attend.
But, I could deny him nothing. He loved the dances, the shamisen, the way the geiko would engage him with the utmost respect, but as though he were just another client, which he loved. It made him feel normal.Three years later... and I find myself giving in to him yet again as he says my name with that honeyed voice and asks me for his favorite girls. And I stand and oblige, because I can't help but to. Because there is nothing I wouldn't do for him. A slave to a legend. A happy slave, and a slave by choice. There really is no other place I would rather be.
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May All Be Pain or Love