InuYasha Fan Fiction / Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ The Blue Anshan ❯ Seeking 4 - Mistakes Were Made ( Chapter 8 )

The Blue Anshan

By Alesyira

Summary: It seems like everywhere Shippo goes leads to interesting tidbits but a bunch of nothing. Thankfully, every day is an opportunity to learn something new about yourself.

Chapter Rating: M. Probably? it might cross a few 'teen' lines so let's be safe. Gets a little dirty.

Disclaimer: Inuyasha is owned by Rumiko Takahashi, and Yu Yu Hakusho is owned by Togashi Yoshihiro. I make no profit from this piece of fiction.

Arc 2 - Seeking 4 - Mistakes Were Made

1505

children's stories

The two youths weren't even half my height and were barely able to carry the basket between them. Something had caused them to trip in their haste, and I'd noticed them falling and spilling their precious cargo as Hu and I vaulted a low wall. One of the two cried out in dismay as the other scrambled with frantic whispers to collect their goods. She saw me hesitate at the next leap and correctly guessed my intentions. "Leave them!" she hissed lowly, flinging her hand at me.

I grinned in response but ignored her, looking around for potential danger. "Nope, those kids need help."

"We are in the middle of fighting peoples! We are not invincible - leave them!"

"They're weaker than we are. It won't take long."

I didn't argue with her further, just hopped down beside the closest youngster and tipped the basket upright. The kid gasped in surprised alarm (I hadn't bothered to disguise myself, oops) but quickly gathered that I was there to help them. We scooped up the small green things by the handful and had nearly finished when someone a short distance away called out some kind of angry-sounding phrase.

(It turned out that was a soldier shouting an order to identify myself, and soldiers take it pretty seriously if you ignore them in the middle of a war zone.)

It wasn't my fault I couldn't understand everything they said!

I heard the familiar faint whoosh of an arrow's fletching zipping through the air, but after previously being on an archer's good side 100% of the time, it didn't register as a threatening noise. …It is admittedly a marginally alarming noise, now.

The good news: the kids escaped safely with their vegetable basket.

The bad news: that arrow hadn't been aimed at them to begin with, and it didn't miss its target.

It hit the mark with a solid thunk, and I reacted appropriately:"FUCK."

The impact was unexpectedly painful, but I really think it surprised me more than it hurt. I whined pathetically, reaching awkwardly over my shoulder to try and catch hold of the shaft. Hu dropped to the street beside me and hauled me up by the arm onto a nearby roof, out of sight of the approaching soldiers and the archer that had gotten the easy shot.

"You are like a baby! No sense of danger!" Hu hissed at me while pulling the arrow from my back. It hadn't pierced deeply, but ripping it free didn't feel too good.

I bled all over my shirt. I didn't have a spare.

weak

Hu peeked over my shoulder around the corner at the small group of guards standing haphazardly near the large entrance we had approached. "Are they even guarding anything?" I wondered quietly, narrowing my eyes at them. Two laughed at a story being told by a third, while a few others stood leaning against their tall weapons staring out at the streets with bored expressions. You'd think being in the middle of some violent whatever-was-going-on they'd be a little more alert.

I heard Hu lick her lips in anticipation. "We could become beauties and lure some guards to us..."

I shook my head. "No, we don't need to harm them if we can sneak by."

"Why care what happens to these humans? They are cruel to these people living here. They are weak. They are snacks."

"When my father died, humans took me in. No one else would help me. I know some people are monsters, but some youkai are monsters too. I know a taijiya -a demon hunter- that only kills bad youkai, and spares the ones who are doing good and trying to live peacefully. If these soldiers aren't actually doing anything awful, then we shouldn't kill them indiscriminately. When you're strong, you should protect those who cannot protect themselves."

She frowned at me. "And if these humans attack weaker humans?"

I shrugged. "Fair game, then."

She sniffed and turned her face away. "Fine. But I still say we should appear as beauties. Females look less threatening."

"You're already a beauty and you lure men in without trying. I don't want to be bait. I want to be sneaky."

We crouched at the corner for a few more minutes in silence before Hu spoke again. "We have spent more time arguing than sneaking. Why not a window?"

I sighed and covered my face with a hand. "…is there a window?" She shrugged and we backtracked, finding one of many windows that would let us bypass the guard post. "I feel like I waste a lot of time with you."

She glared at me askance with an expression that mirrored my grouching.

studious

We quickly and quietly slipped through the hallways in search of anything helpful. We passed through areas filled with scrolls and bound tomes, but many were written in language that Hu couldn't read, and looked like squiggles and scratches in comparison to the texts I had gotten to see at Haeinsa Temple. "Kami, this building is huge! We are going to need someone who knows their way around to show us to the right section."

Hu hummed her agreement. "And then to translate for us, yes?"

Right. I hadn't learned enough to read the texts of this country yet. After running through a few more corridors, we were lucky to not bump into any more armed men, but instead found a single young man huddled in an alcove, shivering and spattered with blood. Hu knew enough of the language to ask him for help, but he shrunk back from us even further.

I turned toward her suspiciously. "What did you tell him?"

"I told him we wouldn't kill him if he shows us what we're looking for quickly."

"Damnit, Hu, don't you know how to be nice to humans?" She knew how, but it had been a long time since she cared enough to practice it. "Tell him that if he can help us find what we're looking for, we will help him escape this place safely." She translated, and he relaxed a little, nodding to us while still shivering a little in shock and fear. He poked his head out of the alcove and peeked in both directions before beckoning us to follow with a frantic wave of the hand. He backtracked through three corridors we'd just passed through and made a left, left … right … right… ….left…. ugh. I was pretty sure we had traveled in several circles by the time we arrived at an area of the building he indicated carried some of the mythologies I had hoped to find.

The scholar helped us fish out a few tomes, but screams sounded in the distance and we realized time would probably be very short. Hu suggested we come back in a few years after the fighting had cooled down, but I didn't want to risk coming back to find the literature collections in ruin.

This was the worst timing from a research point of view, like looking for a needle in a haystack… while the haystack is on fire and the needle is wooden so you can't just come back after the flames have died down to sift through the ashes.

Our conscripted research assistant got more jumpy and frightened as new sounds of fighting occasionally broke out and echoed through the halls. Hu got an idea and fetched a few more assistants with promises of aid for escape, and once there were several humans clustered around tables they seemed to feel more comfortable together. They worked quickly under the flickering light of foxfire (this would be a tale they'd probably pass to their grandchildren, that one time we were held hostage by studious magic foxes during the great civil war) and occasionally waved us over to whisper their findings.

One of the humans knew this section of the archives pretty well and helped us find more relevant passages regarding the myths most related to my kind (thankfully still considered 'good' spirits versus the evil, murder-you-to-eat-your-organs type that became more popular in later centuries).

No suggestions on where we might look to find a few, though.

We were arguing heatedly over some tidbit of knowledge a scholar had just relayed to us when a willowy, tawny-skinned being suddenly became visible by my right arm. One of the humans gasped in alarm. The tall being stared us down for a few uncomfortable moments with an expression of disdain and disbelief before saying anything. Hu had to do all the speaking with the magical creature, whom I couldn't quite peg as being youkai in nature. Wisps of what might have been hair (or smoke) drifted from the back of a skull with such harsh lines that he looked like he'd been chipped from stone by a clumsy sculptor. I was quickly discovering that magic around the world seemed to fall into different categories that we didn't have at the time in my homeland.

Of course, I only understood a few words from the magical creature. He spoke in angry, hushed tones: something, something, idiot, something-something, phrased like a question.

Hu responded quickly, gesturing to me, pointing at the scholars around us, then asked her own question.

He considered for a moment, then replied at length. I understood lord, mountain, water, north, and danger. Of course, it wouldn't be an interesting adventure if there wasn't danger around every corner…

When they'd finished speaking, he took a glance around at the scholars watching us with wide, frightened expressions, gave a disdainful sniff, then dissipated in a swirl of color. Hu shrugged at me, motioned for the others to wrap up what they were doing, and pulled me aside to give me a brief summary of what she'd been told. "He was angry that we revealed ourselves to these people. He said we wouldn't find much here from the humans about your family, only children's stories. A lord in the mountains to the north might have more for us to read and others who can help. But he also warned of large water on the way, where there has been danger lately." Her eyes sparkled with her obvious interest, and I was pretty sure we wouldn't be going around the danger.

Morning had grown close, and we couldn't risk these humans staying in potential danger for the sake of my curiosity any longer, especially knowing the information we wanted probably wouldn't be found here. Hu figured out an escape path we could all follow and I covered our rear with an illusion of fog that fled along the corridors with us. We helped them through a window near an unguarded section of wall, then leapt them in pairs over to the relative safety of the dark alley nearby.

We had gathered six exceptionally grateful scholars to help escape, and once Hu had confirmed that we had taken them far enough away from the fighting, they bowed dozens of times until we were out of sight. "I think your sparkle made a positive impression on that lot."

"I do not have sparkle," she muttered, probably unfamiliar with my term.

"Your glow? You are like the sun shining, even at night." And she really did. Lately, her skin held a subtle glow. I had noticed it, but I'm not sure everyone could see it as well as I could.

She frowned, but I think she understood it as a compliment as she eyed me thoughtfully. Even so, she tugged a concealing wrap around her exposed skin as we fled quickly through the empty morning streets.

I snagged clean clothes from a drying line on our way out of the city, exchanging my bloodied outfit with a silent apology to the owner.

Still no spare. Maybe I needed to find some nice youkai-powered clothes that would clean and fix themselves…

grown-up stories

It wasn't immediately noticeable, but it got easier to travel with Hu as time went on. When we first met, she had a tangibly creepy evil-vibe, but the more time we spent together, she gained a literal brightness and the weirdly bad feeling she gave me faded away. I would soon discover why, but it had turned into a pleasant companionship.

We traveled north with far less haste than we had before. As the days and weeks went by, my rush to learn about family started to feel more like the adventure it truly was. I wanted to learn more, everything, as quickly as possible, sure… but I had all the time in the world. My only vaguely time-pressed concern was still centuries away. I wondered, sometimes, how much of Kagome I might forget over the long years before our next meeting.

The sun shined brightly in cloudless skies, but the temperature fell quickly as we slipped around the harvested farmlands and villages preparing for winter. I was chilled and missing the forests, but we made good progress and met little trouble. On occasion we chose to break the monotony to walk along the roads, where we were certain to be accosted by the eventual bandit that hadn't planned on meeting supernatural creatures. Hu no longer snacked on these humans, for which I was grateful. We scared off the ones that had resorted to thievery due to stupidity, tried being kind to the ones that were most desperate for survival, and killed those that were obviously being cruel and ruthless for sport. It seemed like such a waste of something so finite - human lives were short. Most of those poor souls only had a few decades of life before they died, often of starvation or conflict. It was depressing. The cold was depressing. I missed my family and friends. My heart felt heavy often as we traveled further.

The season changed to winter in what seemed like a single day, and the farther we traveled from the ocean, the higher elevation we seemed to be. The air grew thin and the vegetation became sparse and brown, dead or hibernating until spring returned.

"You don't look very good," she commented as we leapt side by side over a frost-capped boulder. The land we had been traveling through was bland and brown, with only a few scraggly scraps of shriveled weed clumped near the occasional rocks. This place was very dry and I was thankful it rained only about once every year (and only if the stars had aligned and no one had angered any gods). The few plants seemed to survive on just the dew that could accumulate on surfaces, which seemed to collect better around the clusters of rocks when the temperature was mild enough. That was definitely not today.

"I think you need a snack," she continued, turning around to face me while she skipped backwards.

"What? I don't need a snack, we just ate breakfast!" My stomach churned suddenly. I hadn't felt like eating when the sun came up, but I'd forced down some of our rations anyways.

"No, not food..." She stopped suddenly and I had to as well to avoid running face-first into her. She nodded slowly as she prowled around me in a circle, considering something. "You need..." she waved her hands vaguely toward me, outlining my shape. "Hm." She couldn't seem to think of the word.

She took one of my hands within hers. Her fingers were toasty warm as she curled them around my palm. "I am well. You are not." She placed my cold hand against the warm skin of her cheek and tilted her head, looking at me with concern. The sun was rising over the horizon, and those rays shining through the cloudless sky made her hair sparkle. "I am shining. You are not. You need a snack. I will share."

It took a minute for me to comprehend what she meant. She must be right; I couldn't even think straight. "No, I can't do that... I can't snack on people. It's ... not right." I shook my head at the idea of feeding on and killing people, and my entire body shuddered as a shiver unexpectedly rocked through me. I was cold. I looked past her at the empty distance ahead of us. I knew I'd warm up again once we started running once more.

She cocked her head and made a face before she threw her hands out to the side, indicating the miles of desolation around us. "There are no humans here. I said I will share."

I must have looked absolutely clueless, because Hu sighed, glared at me in irritation, then put a hand on her hip to look at me sideways from the corner of her eye. "You still do not understand." This wasn't a question. She sighed again. "This I can teach. You must want to take. It is like greed; you must want what they have. Come here."

I approached her cautiously, not sure exactly where this was going.

"Kiss me," she commanded.

I frowned, casting my gaze around and feeling a little awkward. I'd spent months with this female but the thought of being physical with her had never even crossed my mind. I'd joked about ogling girls with Miroku and Hachi, and I had some interest in... well... never mind... but aside from occasional warm fuzzy feelings toward a very few special ladies in my life, being physical —kissing or anything else— hadn't come up.

I had only been a suddenly-mostly-grown male for a bit longer than a year, and I'd been far too busy running for my life and learning random new stuff to survive on the fly that, well … with such a recent transition from kid to not-kid, I was still a virgin.

I leaned forward and kissed her, but it was chaste and brief. (I definitely didn't have warm fuzzies for her.) Her glare clearly showed she thought I was an idiot. "Alright, I will teach you how to kiss, first." She snagged the edges of my shirt and yanked me hard against her.

Within what may have been two minutes or two days (I very much lost track of time), my entire view of the world turned upside down. My thoughts became a jumbled mess and suddenly I had new priorities in life that ranked far above finding my extended family. I had just been introduced to the most important of the mysteries of adulthood, and nothing mattered more than getting into this woman's... er... getting this woman to teach me everything she knew.

Then she slapped me in the face. (Literally.) I guess I got a little too into the moment.

"Passion is sharing; giving and taking. If you cannot focus on this task carefully, you might kill someone."

I looked at her in disbelief. "Don't you kill all of the humans you have fed from?"

"Not all of them, only those that do not deserve life."

I'm not sure how she judged who deserved life, but I shrugged. "Okay."

"Kiss me, slowly. Pay attention to what I do. Mimic my actions, and feel." She placed her hand over my heart. "You must reach out with your entire being and take what you need, but you cannot take from the unwilling. They must want you to take… For this to work you must help your partner to want you and you must not become lost to your desire."

She leaned toward me slowly, her eyelids drifting half shut as she glanced at my lips. She thread delicate fingers into the hair at my nape, tracing her other fingertips up over my shoulder. Her lips pressed against mine once, brushing the soft petals from side to side, and she whispered at the corner of my mouth, "feel..."

Oh, I was feeling alright. Blood rushed straight to my groin and I had to fight to keep my arms still. I wanted to clutch this female to me and do unspeakable things I didn't yet understand.

Her lips parted over mine and I responded with an audible sigh, reaching toward her with my mouth and trying to press closer to her.

She unexpectedly punched me in the chest. "Quit skipping ahead. You must feel! What you are doing is falling into my trap, giving to me instead of taking." We tried again and it was mere moments before I'd fallen right back into the uncontrolled youthful bliss.

She ripped herself away from my mouth with an irritated sound and took a moment to calm her anger at my inexperience. "I think you need to understand what it is we do."

I made a noise in agreement, my gaze focused on her lips as she spoke. I was not in the mindset to learn anything at that time, and she knew it.

She nodded once to her decision and yanked me toward her, any further attempts at teaching apparently thrown out the window. Her hands flew over my body and any remaining conscious thought left my brain.

Clothes disappeared, mouths mapped paths across skin, and tendrils of her ki crept along my skin as I groaned helplessly under the onslaught of her caresses. She swallowed my sounds with her mouth, and when she finally joined us together I thought I would die from the unbelievable pleasure.

Actually, I almost did die.

My energy was ridiculously low, and I understood much later that the near-complete lack of plant life in the area was what almost did me in. I am (primarily) a forest kitsune, and I kinda need that constant environmental trickle to keep me running (that, or energy 'snacks' from the people I live around). I had kept my distance from Hu a little too well, and had unintentionally depleted my energy stores with the amount of traveling we had done. If I had understood more about myself, I'd have been able to easily keep my energy up by intentionally snagging energy from the scarce sources along our path, but my ignorance had nearly done me in.

So when she used her ki to let me experience what it was like to have energy stolen in the heat of passion, we both discovered I had a tiny backup reserve.

I was completely lost to the pleasure, my entire being riding ever closer to highs I'd never experienced before as she moved above me, the sweet drugging warmth of her body matching perfectly with the sweet, drugging numbness that accompanied my energy being slowly sucked away. Suddenly, she gasped and came to a complete stop, frozen above me in shock. It took me a handful of seconds to realize she had stopped moving, as my hands were helpfully keeping her hips in motion over mine.

"Sh-shippo..." she stuttered. Her face began to flush red and a cold sweat broke out all over her body. "Something ..." she choked, "something is wrong!" She threw her head back and screamed in agony, trailing off into a long, drawn out wail as she threw her arm over her abdomen and clutched at her neck with a clawed hand.

Speechless and dumbfounded, all I could do was stare in disbelief. This was not my understanding of how 'these things' went. "You must—" tears were starting to drip down her cheeks at this point, "you must take it back!"

Take back my energy?

"No, no no no—it burns!" More crying shifted into harsh, panting screams that ripped from her throat as she writhed in pain, almost like she had been trapped in a fire.

Only one kind of energy that I knew of would burn a youkai, and I couldn't fathom how she had taken such a thing from me. Tears streamed down her face and she started to shake.

"Please..." she begged, clutching at me weakly as her strength failed her.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't understand how the energy transfer was supposed to work!

I knew sex wasn't necessary; I'd seen her suck that human dry on the day we had met with just some smooches. Physical activity likely served as encouragement to continue and a distraction from what was actually happening. The mood had certainly been killed, regardless, even though we were still intimately joined. She panted and sobbed in my lap, lost in her world of pain.

I wrapped my arms around her trembling form and pulled her against my chest, closed my eyes and buried my face in her neck, and felt. The tingle of our energies danced in the space around us, and I focused on the parts that felt most familiar. I could spot some of my energy Hu had stolen, like flickering blue flame just on the verge of sputtering out, weaving in through her own reserves along the edges where we touched. Hu had an overwhelming quantity of golden energy that sparkled like sunlight in morning dew, and then I noticed she also had some traces of a twisting, oily purple. Once I had spotted this strangeness, the remnants of her darkness, I could see what was happening to my partner.

Thin, burning wisps of angry pink tore through the purple wherever it came into contact. I knew this energy wouldn't kill her as it cleansed the remaining traces of evil from her being, but it probably hurt really bad.

I reached out with my dwindling blue; I could see it in my mind as it crept over her body and slipped into her skin. I coaxed the pink toward me with gentle nudging, pulling it back along tenuous lines to myself. I felt a physical warmth blooming under my skin where I managed to recall the pink ki, and as I drew the last of it back, it seemed to curl up deep within me, hidden away and tucked against my heart. I marveled at that little piece of Kagome I had gotten to keep.

Hu was sniffling in my arms, her face hidden in my wild mess of red hair. "That was awful." Then she pulled her face back from mine. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

I sighed and hugged her tight, thinking of my lost friends.

"Well... you remember how I told you I was raised by humans for a while? It's a bit of a long story, but my favorite human was a priestess." Hu's eyes were wide and glistening with remnants of her tears. I brushed my thumb across her cheek. When she wasn't actively snacking on humans, she was very pretty. I was very thankful that she didn't have much of the stolen human energy left in her system. She might have melted outright if she had done this on one of her darker days. I shuddered at the thought of the mess that might have made, and of losing what was becoming a close friend.

"I... understand. Long ago, my favorite human was a priest."

We stared at each other for a moment. "Does it still hurt?" I whispered. It could have been about the present and nearly dying, or about the past and long lost friends.

She shook her head. "No pain." She shuddered at some memory and I hugged her tighter. "You'll try again? To take from me?"

"I just took from you!" I said, not sure what she was getting at. "I took the burning power from you - remember?"

She punched me again. "No, I am full of the sun. You take some of this. I am getting more doing nothing." She shook her mane of nearly-blonde hair to emphasize, and it shimmered with unnatural light in the warm sunshine. It was strange to think back to when we first met and she had such dark features, like the night… or death.

I nodded solemnly and closed my eyes, focusing my attention back into the gentle flow of our energies. Her sunshine warmth overflowed her form, leaking into the air around us, and I caught a trace of it concentrated and glimmering from somewhere to our side. My attention was quickly pulled back to the two of us as she shifted in my lap and sighed. Magic warmed the air between us as I tried to coax some of her excess to me. The first trickle of golden shimmer I managed to draw away from her quickly turned brown and infused my body with a brief surge of strength before the glowing pink warmth near my heart wrenched in agony. I gasped, my attention shattered as instant nausea welled up within me.

I clapped my hand over my mouth, eyes wide. Hu was staring at me in surprise and concern. "This is … not right," she muttered, closing her eyes and concentrating. "I will try.." she trailed off, thinking as she focused her attention on our energies. Her fingertips traced along my back and I could feel magic gathering at her fingertips. "I do this sometimes, when I have extra," she whispered as the energy slid into my skin like a beam of sunshine pouring warmth through a break in the canopy of trees. I shuddered with the sudden influx of warmth, but the pink energy settled once more in peace as the golden energy trickled in as a gift. I realized quickly that I could receive from Hu but could not take.

My skin warmed, my strength returned, and the two of us sat together, still joined, staring at each other in wonder.

Hu grimaced after a moment of consideration. "Your favorite person ruined you."

I smirked and shook my head. "Maybe, maybe not. She's still my favorite person."

She gave me a funny look, then, and I realized I spoke of Kagome in the present tense. "She's no longer in this world, but I know I'll see her again someday."

Hu nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps I will find my favorite person again, too, one day." She sighed, looking away. We both fell into thoughts of other people for a brief time until one of us moved, and we remembered what we'd been doing before the pain and discomfort. I gasped in surprise as my body reacted unexpectedly, and even to this day I'm still shocked and appalled that I could sit with a naked female in my lap for that long without remembering or recognizing our perfectly compromising position. I was a sad example for all kitsune that morning.

With my energy back and our attention better focused on the present, we both laughed and sighed and made a mess of ourselves in the dirt as she taught me things I hadn't fathomed in my wildest dreams.