Harada POV

The streets of Kyoto were eerily quiet, like the perfect calm before a storm. Earlier that evening, three rasetsu had escaped from Shinsengumi's headquarters and had made their way into the capital streets. Harada, the tenth division's red-haired captain, was pulled from his night off by the vice commander to fix the problem along with his fellow comrades Nagakura, Saito, and Okita. The men fanned out across the street, checking down alleyways and side streets looking for any signs of the creatures. The first hour of their search turned our fruitless.

Harada could feel the Vice commander, Hijikata's, frustration blooming like a dark cloud stretching across the sky, darkening everything its shadow touches. Heads would roll, and guts would spill for this carelessness. Luckily for them, there wasn't much going on in the capital that night. The bitter chill of winter had overtaken Kyoto, driving its citizens to take cover indoors. This was good for keeping a low profile but also meant that the rasetsu would most likely travel to more obscure locations searching for prey.

Nagakura let out an exasperated sigh and kicked a nearby stone into the side of a closed-up shop. "Where the hell are they?" He asked impatiently.

"They're fast, so it's possible they're already to the red light district by now," Hijikata said coldly.

"Which means it's also possible that they're lurking somewhere nearby," Okita said lightly. "Just wait for the screams, then we will get a definite location instead of wandering in the cold all damn night."

"Those screams would be from innocent civilians being slaughtered, Souji! Can you live with that?" The commander scolded.

Okita snorted. "The only civilians out at this hour are ronin...sooo, yea, I can live with that."

Harada rolled his eyes at the callus first division captain and scanned a nearby alley for the missing rasetsu. Three figures rounded the corner from the connecting street and began making their way up the path. Harada gripped his spear and took up a defensive stance. The three approaching men looked normal enough, but it was hard to tell with how dark it had become that night.

"The damn bastard got away," one of them slurred.

"I think he turned down here," another replied.

Harada relaxed some in his stance; they were clearly not rasetsu. The men had barely stumbled into the alley when two events happened simultaneously that changed the course of everyone's lives that night. A blinding, pulsating light appeared in the center of the alleyway and spit out a screaming flailing figure onto the dirt path. They landed with a harsh thud then skidded a good five feet before colliding with the side of a building. The person, whoever they were, laid motionless on the ground after that. At this time, the rasetsu sprang down from the rooftop of the building the seemingly unconscious person had just crashed into. They landed on the three men in the mouth of the ally, and chaos ensued.

Harada and Nagakura exchanged bewildered glances before turning to Saito and Okita, who appeared to be equally as baffled. All eyes then went to the vice commander who was staring, mouth gaping down the side street, momentarily too stunned to give an order.

"Well, commander?" Okita asked as he drew his blade and waited for the command to begin the slaughter.

Hijikata snapped out of his stupefied daze and began barking orders. "Souji, Saito, you're with me. We're going to end those rasetsu. Saito, go two streets down and cut them off; Souji, take this alley down to ensure they make it to Saito. I'm going to make sure there are no witnesses or bodies around here. Harada, Nagakura, go find out what the hell was just thrown out of that...that..." Hijikata was at a loss for words and didn't appear to want to come up with an explanation for what they just saw. Instead, he turned on his heel and took off in a sprint to scout the area.

Harada exchanged one last look with his friend, who simply shrugged and walked over to the figure lying in the shadows. They approached them carefully, hands on hilts, ready to attack if there was a fight. There wasn't much light to see the whole scene, but it became clear that the unknown figure wasn't wearing any pants when they got close. Pale white legs laid twisted under a short dark garment that barely reached their knees, and they had pointed spiked shoes attached to their feet.

"What the hell is he wearing?" Nagakura asked.

"I'm not so sure that's a he..." Harada said as he brushed the mess of curls out of the person's face.

She was definitely a woman, a young woman at that. She had a lovely round face with high cheekbones and plump red lips. Her clothing was strange and foreign, and she had suffered a few minor injuries; that was all he could make out there in the dark at that moment. Despite her disheveled appearance Harada found her to be quite pretty. He had to resist the urge to take off his coat and lay it over her exposed skin.

"Do you think she is some kind of geisha?" his friend asked.

"Not any kind I've ever seen." And, he had seen quite a few.

The girl on the ground let out a soft groan that hinted she was in pain—something to be fully expected after the fall she just took. Harada made a mental note that she would probably need medical attention here soon, depending on how hard she hit the building. Her hands clenched into fists, and she jolted up about an inch or so with a gasp of shock. Slowly, the girl pushed herself up into a sitting position, hissing quietly in pain.

Nagakura reached out a gentle hand and helped her right herself. She looked up at the two men in front of her, pushing her unruly hair out of her face. The moon had just come out from behind the clouds allowing enough light to illuminate her bright blue eyes boring into them. Harada noticed her injuries to be a lot worse in the new light than he had initially thought. Her hands and knees were covered in small cuts, and she had a large gash running down her right leg. For a moment, he thought she was simply hurt by the fall until he noticed the finger-shaped bruises around her throat; someone had roughed her up pretty bad. A few times, the girl looked between the two men, blinked and rubbed her eyes, then looked again. Her brows knit together in confusion.

"Take it easy," Nagakura said. "You fell pretty hard."

"Where am I?" she asked in a bell-toned voice thick with a foreign accent.

"Kyoto, the market square to be exact."

"Huh?!" The girl asked. Something about his answer had flustered her. She looked around in bewilderment as if she didn't recognize anything around her. Panic crept across her features, and her chest heaved as her breathing picked up.

Harada wondered if she had hit her head too hard. He spoke calmly to her, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"I...was in my mother's lab shutting off the equipment...I think someone tried to hurt me..." the girl looked down at her leg where there was a nasty cut actively oozing blood.

Harada and his friend exchanged another bewildered stare.

"I think she hit her head a little too hard. Every third word sounded like complete nonsense to me," Nagakura decided.

"Yah...Why don't you come with us," Harada said as he took hold of her elbow and helped her stand on shaking legs. "I think the vice commander will want to have a look at you."

Once on her feet, the girl stepped out of his grasp and took a few unsteady steps back. Her hands were up in a defensive gesture, and her eyes bounced between the two of them, searching for signs of danger. They were shifting too fast for her to really pick up on anything, though. Her back foot was angled away from them and ready for her to turn and run. Her body made no move to conceal her intentions; most untrained civilians easily read like her. As he studied the girl, he took note once more of the strange sandals on her feet, wondering how she walked on the unusually pointed heel. There was no way she could run fast in them, surely, she had to know that. Not to mention, the state of her leg would slow her down too.

Her body stiffened when she slowed her eyes down enough to notice the weapons they both carried. He watched her gaze shoot from the swords on Nagakura's hip then up the length of his spear. A strange, muffled cry passed quietly through her lips as she retreated three more steps down the alley. Her body coiled up, ready to spring.

"I'm not going anywhere with you two..." she stated firmly.

"I'm afraid you don't have much of a choice, miss," Nagakura said, taking a step towards her.

The girl retreated back another three steps.

Harada and Nagakura exchanged a knowing glance and a nod before pursuing the girl. She spun on the spiked heel of her strange shoes with more grace and agility than he thought possible and took off in a dead sprint down the alley.

Elena POV

Adrenaline coursed through Elena's veins as she ran down the unfamiliar dirt streets of – apparently – Kyoto. She could hear heavy footsteps close behind her as the two men gave chase. The entire right side of her body throbbed, and she had a substantial amount of blood running down her leg from where it had been sliced open when she fell. The pain didn't slow her; she was too afraid that those men would take her if she slowed down.

She made it to the end of the alley and rounded the corner to find a group of people ahead. She had no clue if they were any less dangerous than the men chasing her, but at the moment, they were out in the open and bathed in moonlight. In the back of her mind, she remembered being taught that she needed to find somewhere well-lit and public if she was attacked. She also noticed they all had white hair and felt a surge of relief wash over her. They were older! Surely, they will help her.

"HELP ME!" She screeched as she approached the group of people. "Please some-" Elena was stopped dead in her tracks. The white-haired men we're standing over top of three mutilated bodies. One was repeatedly stabbing a clearly dead body, another had his face buried inside of the opened gut of another body, and the third turned on her, red eyes shining in the night.

'No! It can't be! How did they get here?' She thought

A blood-curdling scream ripped from her throat as she stared helplessly at the egregious seen splattered on the ground before her. Her cries were short-lived, though. Before any substantial sound could echo through the night, a baseball glove sized hand engulfed her mouth, muffling her terror. Another hand covered her eyes, shielding her from the ugly mess. Her feet left the ground without her consent, and her body was turned in the opposite direction.

"Don't look." A familiar voice hissed in her ear.

Behind her came the swish of a blade cutting air followed by the wet squish of it cutting skin. Elena shuttered and tried to block out the horrors taking place behind her.

"Damn," a voice drawled behind her in a tone laced with mock outrage. "And here I was going to take them out for you, Saito, and save you the trouble. You work too fast, my friend."

"I was just carrying out my orders," Another, much quitter, voice spoke. "Perhaps you should have been quicker."

"Or, perhaps you should have been slower and let them take care of our little runaway there."

Elena stiffened. He was talking about her...he wanted to kill her...A new wave of panic washed over her and refueled her fight-or-flight instincts. She threw her hands up into a defensive technique and knocked the hands from her face. The man holding her was clearly ready for this; and shifted his grip to her wrist instead. His grasp was ironclad and unyielding. Not so easily subdued, Elena took the heal of her stiletto and dug it into the spongy flesh of her captor's ankle. This won her a cry of pain and a relinquished grasp.

Elena didn't have a lot of escape options available to her at that moment. Her two pursuers were standing on either side of her. At the nearest alleyway's mouth were two more men standing over a pile of six dead bodies, one of them being the person who just suggested killing her. There was another side street several yards back, but she had to outrun them all to get to it. Seeing no other option, Elena held out hope that her adrenaline would give her the strength she needed to flee the scene alive.

In the end, however, no amount of adrenaline would have saved her. When she got to the side street she intended to escape down, she came throat to blade with yet another man. Elena skidded to a halt, her feet sliding out from under her as she fell backward in an attempt to not decapitate herself on his sword. A new sting of pain bloomed as she reskinned some of her previous injuries and acquired new ones. Tears sprung into her eyes, but she refused to let them fall; there was no time for weakness.

Exhausted and defeated, she stared up at the new black-haired man glaring down at her. His sword was thrust directly under her throat, its thin blade gleaming in the moonlight as if it were trying to boast about how sharp it was. The front of his body was cast in shadows as his back was to the moon. Still, even in the obscurity, she could make out his fierce expression and dangerous intensity of his gaze.

"Listen very carefully," he said in a quiet voice that promised violence if she didn't comply. "Don't move. Run, and I won't hesitate to kill you."

"Vice commander," the voice of one of her earlier pursuers said from behind her, pulling the man's attention away from her but not his blade. "She's from the alley. She hit her head pretty hard; I think she's just scared and confused. I doubt she has any clue what she just saw."

The vice commander's head snapped back down to her as he eyed her harshly. His head cocked ever so slightly to the side as he looked her up and down, scrutinizing her from head to toe. His sword lingered at her throat for a beat longer, and then it was replaced back in its sheath.

"You can't be serious commander; she's a witness! She saw everything-"

"Shut it, Souji." The vice commander said with barely contained rage, "Help Saito take their coats and clean up this mess. Yamazaki will be here soon to dispose of the bodies. Harada, Nagakura check on her injuries; her entire right leg is covered in blood. Patch up what you can, then tie her up and take her back to headquarters. I'll have Sannan take a look at her there. We'll figure out what to do with her in the morning."

Elena wilted in exhaustion. She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her head on them; She was tired and officially out of fight. Elena wanted desperately to go to sleep, or hell, to wake up from this nightmare, but she didn't dare close her eyes. Not with all of those murderous men working around her. One of her pursuers, an Amazonian redhead with amber eyes that seemed to shine iridescently even in the darkness, knelt beside her.

"I'm going to take a look at your leg, okay?" he asked as he wrapped a mammoth-sized hand around her relatively tiny ankle.

She sucked in her breath and stiffened but didn't fight him. Her eyes were locked with his, and nothing about them showed any hint of wanting to harm her. He and his partner, a spiky-haired brunet with blue eyes and more muscle than she had ever seen on another human being, made quick work of her injuries. For being a pair of muscle-headed men, their hands were surprisingly gentle when handling her wounds. Elena stayed reasonably docile while they worked. Whether she was compliant because she was afraid to fight them or she was too exhausted to fight, she didn't know anymore.

"Shinpachi, hand me the rope," the redhead requested.

Elena's head snapped up when hearing those words. She couldn't let him tie her up. She was already injured, and out of adrenaline, she would have no chance of escaping this mess if she was compromised any further. The brunet handed over a large coil of rope, which the redhead took and started wrapping around her wrist. He barely had it looped around her once before she tried to yank her hand away.

"No, stop it! You can't do this!" She cried.

"Commander's orders," the redhead told her sympathetically. "Please don't fight, you'll only make things worse for yourself."

"A-am I being kidnapped?"

The redhead's eyebrows knitted together. He stayed quiet in contemplation for a long moment, tying the rope firmly around her left wrist despite her struggles.

"I suppose that is one way of putting your situation..." He said finally as he folded both her arms behind her back and tethered them to one another.

"And how would you 'put my situation,'" she demanded as panic crawled up her throat and threatening to suffocate her.

"I'm struggling to come up with a nicer way of putting it..." he replied honestly.

"Don't do this! Please!" Elena pleaded with him, feebly trying to fight him off as he wrapped the rope around her shoulders, completely immobilizing her upper body.

He cut off the excess rope with the razor-sharp tip of his spear and used the leftover to tie her ankles together. He muttered something about 'killer shoes' that she knew wasn't meant to be taken as a compliment. Once she was completely secured, he slipped an arm under her knees and around her back and picked her up. Elena squirmed and tested the ropes' strength, which earned her a hard stare from her captor.

"Quit struggling, you're just going to hurt yourself."

"Where are you taking me? Where are we?"

"I'm taking you back to the Shinsengumi headquarters; you will be staying there tonight. As for where you are, like I told you earlier, you're in Kyoto, the capital of Japan."

"Kyoto? That's not the-" realization washed over with the crushing force of a tsunami. The dirt roads, the old buildings, the weird clothes, Kyoto, the Shinsengumi...She wasn't in her own time period anymore! Elena was never good with history, but she knew enough to place herself in the mid-1800s.

"Are you alright? Did the ropes pinch you?" he asked her, adjusting his hold on her to alleviate the pressure on her arms.

"I-I'm fine..."

Elena felt silly that the conclusion she had drawn that night was time travel. Still, it was the only thing that stuck. Besides, as the saying goes, 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' Sadly for her, however, this wasn't the first improbable truth she had to swallow in her life. Elena had to bite back the manic laugh bubbling up in her throat.

"How do you know English?" she asked, trying to take her mind off her troubling thoughts.

"Huh? English?"

"Your speech. You just said we're in Japan, yet you speak perfect English."

"What are you talking about? I'm not speaking English, I'm speaking Japanese just like you...Jez you hit your head really hard, didn't you?"

Elena's ears hummed with anxious confusion. None of this made sense; she had never been to Japan. There is no way she knew Japanese. Panic was starting to set in when she felt a sudden sharp pain at the back of her skull. The brunette had run his fingers through her hair and located a large, tender knot. Elena hissed and jerked away.

"Ah! That really hurt!"

"That's one hell of a knot she's got there," he said. "It's no wonder she's confused. Sannan will need to take a look at that too. Hey kid, do you at least know your name?"

"Elena."

"My name is Sanosuke Harada." The man holding her said politely. "My comrade here," he continued with a not to the brunet, "is Shinpachi Nagakura."

"Nice to meet you," Nagakura said.

"Likewise,...I guess..."

Nagakura chuckled with little humor. "I guess it might not be so nice for you right now, huh..."

Elena didn't answer.

"So, you are a foreigner then?" Harada asked lightly

"Yah...I guess you could say that."

A brisk wind whipped through the streets, slicing through her dress easily and frosting her bones. Elena shivered defenselessly, teeth chattering.

"What the hell brings a girl dressed like you to Kyoto in the middle of the night?" Harada asked, his voice turning to steel as he pulled her tighter to him and hunched his massive shoulders in an attempt to shield her from the wind.

"Is this the beginning of my interrogation?"

Another humorless chuckle. "No," Harada told her. "We'll be arriving at the compound soon. I'm also not the one tasked with asking those kinds of questions."

Elena didn't get a good view of the compound without the sun, but she could definitely tell it was massive. She did her best to pay attention to where they came in in relation to the small room they ended up in. It wasn't terribly far from the exit, but she didn't have a chance of outrunning anyone that far with her injured leg. Harada and Nagakura parted ways at the entrance leaving the two redheads alone together. Harada put her down gingerly on the floor in the middle of the room.

"Wait here, I'll get a brazier to warm you up."

"I don't think I'll be going anywhere," she reminded him crossly.

Harada graciously ignored her dig and brought back the small heat source quickly. He placed it near her, and they waited for the room to heat up. As warmth slowly crept back into her hands and shoulders, Elana was hit with another wave of lassitude. She allowed her eyes to dip closed momentarily and just let herself be. She began nodding off quickly but was awoken by a soft knock at the door. Her head snapped up, and her chest hiccuped in a violent gasp.

"Calm down," Harada commanded gently. "It's just Sannan coming to fix up your leg."

The door to the room slid open to reveal a middle-aged man with shoulder-length brown hair and glasses. He stepped into the room quietly and regarded her with a warm smile that eased some of the tension coiled up in her belly. Sannan took a seat on her right side and deposited a crate full of supplies next to him. Harada helped him unpack it while he turned his attention to Elena.

"Good evening, my name is Keisuke Sannan. I have been informed that you have injured your leg and took a nasty blow to the head. May I take a look?"

Elena nodded; she didn't remember hitting her head and didn't really notice the pain except when Nagakura had touched the knot back there. This was most likely because her entire body felt like one throbbing bruise. Sannan started by examining her headfirst, finding the sizable knot towards the back of her skull with ease. He gave his archaic head injury diagnosis to Harada, probably assuming that she, a woman, couldn't possibly understand the concept of medicine. He examined the small cuts on her hands and knees for a moment, dabbing at them with a damp cloth and earning a grunt of discomfort from Elena.

"What happened here?" Sannan asked as he crooked a finger under her chin to tilt her head and expose her neck.

"It's nothing," Elena whispered, not wanting to relive the events in the lab.

"The bruises around your neck have the shape of a hand," Sannan observed. "Were you attacked?"

Elena bit her lip and cast away her gaze, refusing to answer. Sannan didn't press further; instead, he moved onto her leg. Grabbing a knife from the supply stash on the floor and slipped it under her blood-soaked bandages and cut them away in one smooth movement. Elena was not used to having blades wielded near her skin and was unnerved by this action. She tensed up, gritted her teeth, and closed her eyes.

"Easy now," Harada placed a firm hand on her shoulder. "He's just removing the bandages. No one is going to hurt you."

"You may want to rephrase that last statement, Harada," Sannan said with a frown as he examined her leg. "I'm going to have to clean and disinfect this cut, which won't be pleasant. The correct thing to tell the child is that no one is going to harm her."

Elena paled. "I can clean the cut," she suggested desperately. "It won't hurt as much if I do it myself."

"I'm afraid that isn't possible seeing as your arms are tied behind your back at the moment. Please understand that I will be as gentle as possible; however, I won't promise a painless experience."

Given no other choice, Elena sat quietly as Sannan set about dabbing the blood and dirt from her wound. For the most part, he was very gentle, as promised. A few times, he had to scrub at dirt ground into the cut, which brought a few tears spilling over her eyes against her will. When all the excess blood and dirt had been removed, she saw that she had a nasty gash running about ten inches down the side of her calf. The wound was pretty deep, but not so much that she was worried about blood loss.

"The cut is just shallow enough that you won't need sutures," announced Sannan.

"That's a relief. Thank you for cleaning this up, it wasn't that painful after all."

"That's because we're just now getting to the painful part."

"What!"

"Lower your voice, please. Remember, it is the middle of the night, and we can't have you making a disturbance." Sannan's voice wasn't angry, but his eyes hardened in a warning.

"I'm sorry, but...what else would you have to do to me? My cut is cleaned, and I don't need sutures..."

"Now I must disinfect the cut."

Elena's eyes drifted down to the rag he was soaking in a strong-smelling clear liquid. Her eyes widened in terror.

"That's not..."

"It's sake," he answered the question she couldn't make herself speak.

­­Elena scrambled away from him as best she could, begging him to reconsider. Overall, the act was useless. Her stilettos couldn't find good leverage to push herself back, and her arms were unusable. All she managed to do was shimmy her hips a few inches back. Sannan locked eyes with Harada over her head and gave him a nod. A strong hand came to rest between her shoulder blades, halting her retreat.

"I am going to ask that you put this in your mouth," Sannan told her calmly. He handed Harada a bunched-up ball of bandages which he tried to shove into her face.

Elena turned her head away, tugging uselessly at her hands in a fruitless attempt to ward him off. "What are you d-"

Her question was cut off as the bandages were pushed past her lips and into her mouth. Harada secured them with a cloth he tied behind her head. Elena screamed indignantly behind the gag.

"My apologies for treating you this way. As I said before, it is the middle of the night, and your presence here is not something we are ready to share with all of our soldiers. Treating your wound with sake will be painful. Forgive me for not believing that you will grit your teeth and bear it silently."

Elena cursed the two men unintelligibly from behind the gag. She was sure they didn't know the exact words she was saying, but the expression on Sannan's face told her that he got the message loud and clear. Harada banded his arm around her shoulders, and Sannan took a firm hold of the rope around her ankles then began pouring the sake. Elena had never had a gash that was as deep as the one she bore that night. The closest she had ever gotten to pouring alcohol on an open wound was when she accidentally rubbed hand sanitizer on a paper cut. It was fair to say that she was unprepared for the pain that came from the pouring of sake.

A fire like pain seared the exposed skin and burned her nerves down to the bone. A high-pitched scream ripped through her throat with such intensity that it threatened to shred her vocal cords. She forgot about every other pain and ailment on her body, for the only part of her that she could feel was the excruciating heat of the cut. The sensation robbed her of her ability to move, breathe, or think. She simply sat in petrified agony and tried to take in breaths that wouldn't come. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks; she no longer had the energy or focus to hold them back.

Sannan placed one of the rags soaked in sake on her leg and carefully dabbed at the cut, forcing the vile liquid further into it. Another scream clawed its way up her throat, effectively muffled by the bandages. One of them was speaking to her, but her eyes were too blurred with tears to see who's lips were moving. She honestly didn't care what they had to say; all she cared about was making the pain stop. Her head began to throb in time with her injury, and black spots formed at the edges of her vision, inching towards the center. Elena continued to scream until the world went black.