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Fragmentary
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Like everything else about Shinomori Aoshi, his insanity was quiet, orderly and perfectly deadly. With Hannya and the other oniwabanshuu's deaths, Aoshi's world had rapidly contracted to a clearing roughly twenty feet across. The day of their death, what had been left of the okashira's heart had folded in upon itself as well, an elaborate origami crafted with pain and self-deceit, until all that remained was a single gemlike point hidden in the darkest corner of the yawning vacuum his spirit was becoming, extinguishing whatever sparks of light and warmth had lingered in his memory.
Nature abhors empty places, though, and like the steady push of water through a cracked dam, Aoshi's mind created a brittle madness to fill the chasm. A structure of perfect efficiency and utter illogic, each day unfolding in exactly the same ritualized manner as the one before.
The graves of his oniwabanshuu were perfectly kept, the stones swept, the weeds cleared away. Each morning found the okashira with his sleeves rolled up, silently tending them, not wishing to interrupt their conversations. After that, the day would progress into his katas, his kodachi flashing in the dappled light, their edges obsessively honed to hair-splitting sharpness.
For some of the insane, madness often went hand in hand with poor hygiene, cleanliness giving ground to the weight of a damaged mind. With Aoshi, of course, it had swung in the opposite direction. Bathing and grooming had moved past being acts of penance into a nearly ecstatic religious fervor.
On every fourth day, he would go into a village nearby to purchase whatever small thing the fragile construct in his mind demanded, his appearance causing conversation to at once come screeching to a sudden halt, and begin with new intensity. Stories circulated, spinning about like leaves caught in a whirlwind. The pale-faced stranger, hair black and glossy as a courtesan's above a face with the delicate sharpness of a fine sword. His white coat was subtly patched.. The damages of that final battle and the wear of the elements kept at bay with the same obsessive care as everything else.
But it was his eyes that sent a frission of fear through the villagers.. His eyes that led them to believe he was not human at all, but some strange demon from the deep woods. Pale and hard, their beautiful color like a frozen pond.. But something dark and terrifying, quick shadows, darted beneath the icy surface, causing even the stoutest hearts to tremble and quietly back away.
It was one of these fourth days that Aoshi was returning to his world in the forest, the weight of the soap in his pocket comforting in that it meant the continuation of his ritual.
He stepped up to the clearing with the same measured footfall as every other fourth day before it, then stopped. He would never be sure which struck him first.. The acrid stench of human waste and refuse... the sound of their disrespectful braying voices.. Or the sheer sight of the interlopers defaming the graves of the oniwabanshuu.
They said words to him, but the words were meaningless babble lost in the sound of the brittle, orderly madness of Shinomori Aoshi shattering into a billion bright fragments in the black space behind his eyes. They were dead before they had time to register the fact that they were doomed. The boy came not long after that, with the beautiful, languid face of a bhodisattva, serene in his own crepulent soul. The beautiful boy offering him a chance to work for the devil himself.
There had been a time when the okashira of the oniwabanshuu would have dismissed him out of hand, his own carefully structured sense of honor unable to accept Shishio's particular brand of malevolence.
But in the silence of the boy's leaving, in the whispering voices of the oniwabanshuu rustling through the leaves..the mad, broken mind of the man with a ghost's cold eyes began to pick up the pieces and reform the unsteady scaffolding in his dark, empty heart.
Oh yes. He understood now.
Perfectly.