A Choice of Roads
by
Anaphalis
Rating: R/M

Summary: A journey of a thousand miles may start with a single step- but what happens if someone walks into you? Battousai the assassin gets transported to feudal Japan. The rest of his year isn't looking very good either. Rurouni Kenshin X Inuyasha crossover. Romance/Drama.

Distribution: My site and FF.Net. All others please ask before taking.

Feedback: Much appreciated at [email protected]

Disclaimer: Inuyasha belongs to Rumiko Takahashi and Shonen Jump. Rurouni Kenshin belongs to Watsuki Nobuhiro and Jump. Brushes on this page courtesy of Pure Anodyne.
Chapter 15: Author's Afterword: End of the Road

The rabbit from Monty Python is one of my least nasty plot bunnies. Nasty, pointy teeth 4evah!
Confession time: "A Choice of Roads" isn't really a story. When I first wrote "A Choice of Roads" I intended it to be a series of short scenes from the alternating viewpoints of Kenshin and Kagome, each scene involving its own road metaphor. "Roads" was never intended to be long, or detailed or even remotely story-like. Of course I ended up trying to turn it into a story, with the end result that I got this horrific story/vignette hybrid monster that proceeded to eat my brain. Thanks Mr. Bunny.

The purpose of "A Choice of Roads" was to satisfy the cannibalistic plot bunny that made me start wondering about Kenshin's past. I'm probably one of the only people out there who likes both Tomoe and Kaoru as characters, so the fact that I thought there was a hole in Kenshin's motivation wasn't because I didn't like them. What really struck me about Kenshin wasn't so much that he was holding on to guilt about his past (which he was) but that he seemed to be holding on to
hope for something other than the situation he was in. Hope implies a couple of things: one- that whatever you are hoping for is still around somewhere (heavily ruling out Tomoe) and two- that there is some chance, no matter how small, and even if it's only in your own mind, that you can achieve whatever it is that you are hoping for. Of course this is probably a paranoid conspiracy from someone who spends way too much time analyzing character behavior, but it turns out that my plot bunnies like paranoid conspiracies.

As soon as the paranoid conspiracy left my brain, in popped another thought. One of my pet peeves with both Tomoe and Kaoru was how they both wanted Kenshin to get rid of the Battousai aspect of his personality. The Battousai was a genuine side of Kenshin's personality and I think a lot of his major personality problems could have been avoided by simply accepting the Battousai for what it was. So which anime character out there has a known track record for accepting multiple personalities containing major bloodlust :)? This of course was where the crossover idea came in. As soon as I started thinking about it, I realized some eerie parallels between both Kenshin and Kagome
and Kenshin and Inuyasha and a rabid plot bunny was born. Of course everyone is free to disagree with any and all of my reasoning :)

One way or the other, I really enjoyed writing this and I hope that you had half as much fun reading it as I did working out my ideas!

Questions

The review questions from FFNet and MediaMiner that probably needed to be answered, in no particular order.

1) Why did you introduce a new character in the last few sentences?/ Who the hell is Kurama?

This one was definitely my bad- I really didn't make it clear what I was going for here. Kurama is actually a character from yet
another anime/manga called 'Yuu Yuu Hakusho'. As far as I can tell, Minamino Suuichi is the human avatar for a famous silver kitsune thief named Youko Kurama, leading to lots of split personality problems and a combined personality named Kurama. Personally, I've always thought that Suuichi bore an eerie resemblance to Kenshin in his looks and certain aspects of his personality and mannerisms (not to mention the whole pink clothing thing), leading me to suspect that Suuichi might have been a reincarnation/descendent of Kenshin. Since the only people who got what I was going for by introducing him (i.e. the reincarnation/descendent thing) were the people who didn't know who Kurama was, I'm going to assume that I pegged Kurama's personality completely wrong. Ah well.

2) Why did Kenshin end up with Kaoru?/ Why was Kenshin's epilogue so depressing?

I like canon. It's a rather strange confession from someone who's a huge fan of alternate pairings, but what I really like doing is taking canon and warping it beyond all recognition. "A Choice of Roads" was ultimately my way of explaining
canon Kenshin, which meant that I had a very small window of time in his life in which to write the story. Most of Kenshin's life is literally a closed book since the series follows him, if you include the OAVs, from childhood through death with very few unexplained gaps. I took a one-year gap between the end of Kenshin's assassin career and the start of his Rurouni career to write "Roads". So why was the epilogue so depressing? The epilogue is basically, with the exception of one tiny tweak at the end, a straight-up summary of the manga and the final OAV. Poor Kenshin.

3) Why did you call the story "A Choice of Roads"?

I know several of you, including my beta Jake, read through this and went, "Well that's nice- but what the hell did it have to do with choices? I mean wasn't the whole point of this thing that the gods went around and screwed up Kenshin's life because he was being disrespectful?" Actually that wasn't quite what I was going for. Throughout the story I try to draw parallels between Kenshin and Kagome and Kenshin and Inuyasha. All three of them, for whatever reason, have an ultimately doomed first love. They all have some major family angst, some major trust issues and continent-sized fears of commitment. That doesn't mean that they aren't given options.

Choice # 1: Inuyasha is given a crossroads where he can start a new life with Kagome or continue to follow the guilt and love he feels for Kikyo and match his end to hers. He chooses to stay on the same path he was following and sticks with Kikyo, not necessarily without some regret.

Choice # 2: Kenshin does choose to move on from his first love with Kagome but when he is given his second crossroads with Kaoru, he doesn't go anywhere. Rather than making a deliberate choice (i.e. 'I will stop hoping for Kagome and devote myself to Kaoru' or 'I will forget Kaoru and spend the rest of my life waiting to meet Kagome again'), he allows his choices to be made for him by circumstances. Ultimately, this doesn't make anybody happy.

Choice # 3: I really seem to screw Kagome over in the love department. First Inuyasha picks someone else. Then, when she tries to move on, her lover's sent back to his own time. This stuff could only happen to Kagome. What separates her out from the boys though, is that it's implied that she is willing to give love another chance, whether or not it is successful. This is a big part of the reason that I don't want to write a sequel, because I think that the point of the story wasn't so much whether or not Kagome's relationship with Kurama ultimately works, but that she was willing to take that chance.

By the way, the title was really inspired by this image I had of Kenshin, Inuyasha and Kagome at a real crossroads with a signpost with two directions - "Letting Go" and "Holding On". Inuyasha was continuing down the road he was already on, looking back over his shoulder, Kagome was turning onto one of the branches of the new road and Kenshin was scratching his head and staring at the directions on the signpost :) Yes- I have a
very vivid imagination :)

4) Are you going to write a sequel?

No.

5) Why won't you be writing a sequel?

Although I'm a huge fan of YYH/IY crossovers, I don't know enough about the YYH universe to write the kind of crossover that I would like to write. Unfortunately Real Life is also going to be heavily cutting into my ability to do research for fanfiction for at least the next eight to twelve months. There are also a lot of really good Kurama/Kagome fics out there and I'm not entirely convinced that I have something new to add (if you've checked my profile you may notice that I have a thing for the more er... "unconventional" pairings when I write). I also have a problem with sequels- I like leaving things a bit open-ended at the end of a story, leaving a little bit to the readers' imaginations. Most sequels I've read, fanfiction or otherwise, have been a disappointment and I don't want to do that for "A Choice of Roads".

6) So "Mobius" isn't a sequel to "A Choice of Roads"?

The only thing that "Mobius" has in common with "A Choice of Roads" is that they are both IY/RK crossovers. Sorry. Although "Mobius" is also going to try to be canon for both series, it won't involve any time travel and it will focus on a very different aspect of the Inuyasha/Rurouni Kenshin universe. And because I believe in giving fair warning- Kenshin, if he shows up in the story, will be, at best, a minor character.

7) So why aren't you doing another Kenshin/Kagome fic?

Because Kenshin's life is a closed book, it is very, very hard for me to write a canon-observing Kenshin/Kagome romance. Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu don't have a closed end in the series (at least to my knowledge) so it gives me a little more room to play.

8) Write a sequel or I will kill your cat/ send you nasty e-mails/ help your cactus with world domination!

That's not a question.

Acknowledgements

First off, a huge "thank you" to my patient, long-suffering betas
'Rath and Jake. Neither of them knew anything about RK and they still waded through the entire story and made it readable, even though Jake called me on the passing-short scenes-off-as-story thing ;) I'd also like to give a "Gold Star" reviewer award to Emerald-Eyed-Faye who, unless I'm mistaken, reviewed nearly Every. Single. Chapter. (and asked about the hamster), You were a huge inspiration (and the hamster loves you)! And a big, big thank you to everyone who took the time to read "A Choice of Roads". "Roads" was the first fanfic I ever wrote and your thoughtful comments and encouragement helped to make it a great experience. And now, on to the responses....
Chapter 14
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