Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Balance ❯ Gingerbread Man ( Chapter 27 )

Disclaimer: midterms are a living form of Hell. I swear, the faculty hates us all.

Balance

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Gingerbread Man

‘What love do I mean? What love can I mean? There is only one sort of love which means a thing.’

He smiled and nodded. Perhaps you are right. A mother’s love is temporary and fleeting; the mother does not live long when compared to the child. The lover—you do mean the lover, yes?

At the man’s nod, he continued. He had known the answer all along, but somehow having it confirmed made it more…real? That was not the best word for it.

The lover is the age of the loved, and they live nearly the same. That love is far more permanent.

He nodded as the man in the mirror shook his head. They had not before disagreed, not really. This was peculiar. Yet one was right, and the other wrong, all while they both knew the real answer.

How peculiar.

‘Permanent?’ asked the man in the mirror. ‘That love is not permanent. That love is barely even lasting. You have it backwards, I think. The mother’s is the love which never dies.’

He looked off into the distance. A swing hung limp from its arch and another rocked back and forth. Why was that? No one was here to ride it. The mood was ominous, he supposed, and ominous moods were associated in his mind with empty swinging swings. But then why was it looming, what made it foreboding? Was something bad to come soon? Who would bring it? From where would it come?

All foolish questions. Something bad was always soon to come. He would bring it; he was the only one there. It would come from himself, from his conversations with his soul, with Fear.

He nearly laughed hollowly again, but it was all rather pointless.

I have found love, you say. Yet this love of mine does not truly love me back.

‘You say so, yet do you know?’

He very nearly told me with his own voice, his own words. That is enough.

The man in the mirror stood from the rock and nodded.

‘You are indeed the fool… You must seek only resolution. There is where you shall find your respite.’

Resolution, he said. Yes, such a thing would be only pleasant…yet I cannot find it until my soul has been laid to rest.

‘Or,’ the man in the mirror challenged, ‘until your torments are resolved. Until you are given a pause from the hectic fray. Until the world lays at peace for a mere moment and you have not a single worry.

‘Until you are able to rest.’

He smiled, a hint of darkness behind it reflected in his soul as the sky darkened.

Catch me, catch me, if you can, I’m not hard to find, I’m the gingerbread man.

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“Shut up.”

Kurama laughed as Hiei let his head fall to his palms, his eyes pressed into them.

“Shut up, Hiei. Is that all you have to say to me? ‘Please shut up’?” The redhead let his teeth bare and spit a little through his fangs, clearly defined as they were now. “That’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.”

Hiei nodded, keeping his head down and his eyes closed. His shoulders shook a little, from what it was impossible to say. Kurama did not lift his eyes from the smaller man, but rather waited for a reply.

How curious it was, Hiei thought, that Kurama did not push him. Here he was, practically laid out on the floor with all parts of himself exposed for the fox to dissect, and Kurama was taking no action but to wait for a response. Taking no action? Perhaps Kurama trusted him enough to wait. Perhaps Kurama knew he would respond. Knew what the answer would be, even. Well, Hiei could play that game. The question was, would he?

No, of course not.

“Yet,” he croaked, not lifting his head, “you love me all the same, is that it? Is that your trick? Used it before, have you?”

Kurama abruptly stopped laughing and glared down at the little hiyoukai. That cut deeper than Hiei would possibly understand, especially in this state, maybe ever. Youko did not throw around his affections so easily; his body, maybe, but not his heart. “I love you” had never been more than a tool to get something from someone who would die as a part of his plan anyway. Even his mother, in a way. “I love you.” She was a tool to save his fox…self. To save Youko Kurama, she was a vessel. She would die soon; human lives did not last long.

Hiei had accused him of stupidity. Indirectly, at least. He had claimed to be not in love, but loving. He had claimed to be not afraid, but confused. He had claimed to be not anything Kurama accused him of.

A small light flickered throughout Kurama’s mind. Accused. Accused accused accused accused accused he had been so furious when Hiei accused him of being stupid, he had turned right around and accused his friend of being confused and blind to everything and anything.

What was so important about this love, anyway? Did he need it to survive, was it necessary to his continued existence? No, no. No, it was certainly not.

Did he need it?

No.

Did he want it?

More than anything.

And what of Hiei?

Did he want it?

Maybe not.

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Yuusuke eyed the paper again, suspiciously turning it upside down and sideways and reading it again. He glared, as though trying to persuade it to reveal some secret he wasn’t getting. Kuwabara had long since stopped trying to read it again, now sitting against the hallways wall—they had left the rotting den long ago, as the stench was making them both ill—and trying to decipher its meaning. On both fronts, little luck was being had.

“Give it up, Urameshi,” Kuwabara said dryly for what might have been the fifth time. Yuusuke seemed on the verge of accepting the advice this time.

On the verge.

“But maybe it’ll say something different upside down,” the man insisted. Kuwabara rolled his eyes and shook his head as he continued to puzzle out the message.

Backwards…

Travel backwards…

Find a clue… Travel backwards find a clue…

Backwards…

Someone was watching them. Someone was watching them very closely and knew enough to know that they had missed a clue they shouldn’t have. Something they had been in a position to see, or to do, and they hadn’t…but…

They had covered everything, hadn’t they? No stone left unturned, right? No…thing, nothing at all left unchecked.

Nothing…

“Wait a minute…”

Yuusuke had finally dropped the paper and regressed to mulling, much like Kuwabara had been for the past ten or so minutes. He looked up at his companion’s exclamation.

“Got something?” he asked, part hopeful, part tired, part annoyed he hadn’t gotten it first.

“Something we missed…”

“We didn’t ‘miss’ anything.”

“Yes,” Kuwabara said with the tone of someone who was realizing something as he spoke, “yes, we did.”

“What?” Yuusuke raised a single eyebrow, half convinced his friend was going crazy under all this pressure.

“The…the shop, the one we were going to go to before we found out Miru was really the brains of this…operation. The place we were going to look for Kurokyoui.”

Yuusuke nodded slowly as his friend spoke. “Yeah…” he said, remembering the shop and the decision to go, then the decision not to. It had been the…the…

“The whip shop!”

“Yes!”

The two friends looked at each other eagerly, leaping up to find Hiei and Kurama.

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“I don’t know,” Kurama hissed. “Maybe I have.”

“You’re lying, you filthy bastard,” Hiei said in a voice so soft it sounded like a whimper. “And you dare accuse me of hiding the truth.”

Kurama cursed under his breath. He should have known he would never be able to get that by Hiei, but he had hoped…that maybe in his weakened and fragile state, maybe he would slip up, and… But no. Hiei would not be so careless.

“You’re right, Hiei,” Kurama replied instead. “You’re right. I have never told someone I loved him and then let him live. It’s all true. Hiei, I am sorry, deep down inside of me. Sorry I lied, sorry I am being so awkward with all of you, sorry I am not being more reliable, more helpful. But Hiei, you cannot possibly know all the pain I have gone through for this girl!”

Hiei finally raised his head, his eyes revealed as slightly damp and maybe redder than they should have been. No hirui stones littered the ground, of course, but he had been emotionally torn, it seemed. Kurama felt a shred of guilt creeping over him. He did love Hiei, after all. That had not been a lie.

This relationship, however, would take more work than he had anticipated. His humanized mind had invented thoughts of enveloping Hiei in a rapturous hug and revealing his love in a monumental confession, only to have it returned with loving eyes and a kindly voice much unlike Hiei’s usually harsh exterior.

Damn fairy tales.

“Tell me, then,” Hiei said simply. “If we are to even attempt some sort of loving relationship—I am not altogether unwilling, you understand, but as of yet, I do not know the extent of my feeling for you. I do not think it is currently more than a trusted friend. But if we are to attempt anything, I must know how this situation involves you. Exactly how.”

This situation. Hiei referred to Miru, of course. Kurama understood that much without question.

The fox took a deep breath. This had all been more emotionally taxing than emotionally liberating, and what with Miru haunting his every thought, he wasn’t sure how much more he could take. He had to try, though. Hiei was right; he wanted a relationship, and he needed to be open about himself.

Sitting on the floor beside his friend, he began to tell the rest of the tale.

“Well, you know that Miru proclaimed for all to hear that the explosion was my doing.” Without even looking at Hiei, Kurama continued. “Unfortunately for her, not many were around at all, and only the lord who had been chasing her heard a scrap of what she shouted. I believe he heard something like ‘your fault,’ but he did not, of course, know who ‘you’ was. Nothing came of that.

“Miru would not be sated with that. She was a stubborn one at that age; she may still be, I do not know. I suspect so. She would have to be, really, what with the lengths she went to in order to convince me I was to blame.”

Hiei nodded, and Kurama still did not notice.

“Well, as you may know or suspect, many, many years passed and we both continued to live in thriving conditions. My life went well—extraordinarily so, at times, and she settled into some sort of life for herself. I never kept track of her and had no means to contact her but for the messages she sent me. The first few messengers she sent me, I was suspicious of, and I killed. By the time I realized that this would be a continuous arrangement and I should try to find and kill her, she was not using living beings anymore and I could not track her without more time than I could afford.

“She was obsessed over me. She wanted me to be found guilty, she wanted for Mukuro to punish me beyond all belief. No one even remembered the event, really, except for her. Even if she made me say I was guilty, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I was a great and well known thief and she had me in her clutches—sort of. Just not quite. She wanted me to be caught, to be hurt and pained and even killed for her crimes. She tried to frame me and failed, but she had—has a streak of determination nearly unmatched, and I would be punished, no matter how long she had to wait.”

“I can see that…” Hiei muttered, this time prompting the fox’s attention. Kurama smiled slightly in response to the utterance and continued.

“She quite literally drove me insane, I suppose is the only way to say it,” Kurama whispered. Hiei let his eyes go out of focus as he listened with rapt attention.

“The conflicting emotions in my heart and my mind, half convinced she was lying and it couldn’t be my fault, but finally breaking down as I forgot what had really happened…it drove me over the edge, nearly. But then the hunter shot me, and I escaped to Ningenkai—escaped from her, too, I should say. I escaped and she left me for twenty-three years. Twenty-three years, Hiei, I was without messages, without notes telling me I was going to hell.

“Then Kurokyoui comes back into my life, and I thought we would kill him and be done with it…but then Miru arrived—showed up—came into the picture…and suddenly it all came rushing back tenfold…

“She wants me to die, Hiei. It’ll be the ultimate revenge. She doesn’t even care if she’s the one to kill me. She just wants me to die and she wants to watch.”

Hiei nodded slightly. In a wash, a rush of emotion and empathy—how it had come to that, he didn’t know, but in a torrent of all that, he felt closer to Kurama that he ever had, and somehow he knew that he couldn’t hate the fox. He couldn’t even be mad at him. Kurama couldn’t find a happy medium between pitifully weak and overbearingly bitter. The rapid changes from one available emotional state to the other, the sudden switches from overwhelmingly happy to morbidly depressed… His emotions…his mind…his heart was too torn down right now for any constant, any balance of that. He needed a friend and Hiei knew, deep in his soul he knew, he was the only one who could be that friend.

Kuwabara would never do. Kurama was fond of the man, but they had never shared a particularly close bond. Yuusuke, like it or not, was born and bred in Ningenkai. He was a demon at heart, maybe, but he was a human in his soul and that was all that really mattered. Hiei was…a demon. Through and through, he had lived the trials and tribulations of a demon’s life. He and Kurama had borne different turmoil, of course. Kurama hadn’t been cast out by his pack and Hiei didn’t have some crazy stalker girl obsessing over a crime he didn’t even remember. But the principle was the same; they had lived lives of hardship and nearly unbearable pain and they would help each other get through it. They would get through it all.

Together.

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“Over here!” Kuwabara called to his partner from across a wide hall. They had been tracking the pair of demons for some time; they had become quite separated somehow, but Kuwabara seemed to have gotten a lock on one of them and things were looking up. Yuusuke rushed over, still bubbling with excitement from “their” decoding of the message (well, he did find it, he deserved some credit).

“Yeah? Can you sense one of them?” the raven haired boy asked eagerly.

“Kurama, I think,” Kuwabara replied with a nod. “It’s not too far off now, but we’d better hurry.”

Yuusuke nodded, and the pair ran off at a normal human’s top speed. Kuwabara occasionally dictated a right or left turn, but mostly they ran straight, until Yuusuke could feel Kurama and Hiei both. They were right around the corner.

Remembering the last time an intrusion like this one had been made (mere minutes ago, in fact), Yuusuke rapped on the wall before poking his head out.

“I’m turning this corner now!” he said loudly. “This corner, this sharp corner right here! I sure hope I won’t see anything that could disrupt our mission or possibly create awkward social situations! And here I go, turning this corner, this corner that I’m looking at, this corner right here!”

Even with all his forewarnings, Yuusuke edged around the bend slowly. He made sure his knuckles would be visible gripping the wall before pulling the rest of his body along, only to be met with equally dry glares from Hiei and Kurama as he finally made it. He instantly balked, switching between tenting his fingers and wringing his hands. Hiei rolled his eyes.

“Honestly, detective, you could have been clearer,” he noted sarcastically. “What do you want now?”

Yuusuke set his fist on his hip and glared. Kuwabara stood beside him, confused at the scene he had walked in on but hiding it well. Kurama smiled softly, his eyes closed, and Hiei leaned back against the wall, one knee drawn up to his chest and his feet firmly planted, as though to run at any given moment.

“Well, you’d think I was intruding on something important!” Yuusuke said, equally sarcastic and with more obvious stress. This time Hiei did stand, using his posture rather than his height to impose in some way. His eyes slit, he glared evenly at both Yuusuke and Kuwabara, the latter for no more reason than he was there.

Or something.

“Yuusuke,” Kurama said, stopping the conversation before it got serious, though his eyes glittered in amusement. “What have you and Kuwabara found?”

“A message,” the taller man replied, nudging his friend to hold up the paper. “Best we can figure, it says something like ‘travel backwards find a clue you’ll regret you skipped.’” Yuusuke nodded emphatically as Kuwabara recited the note.

“Backwards?” Kurama asked, bewildered. “But we…”

Realization dawned on both him and Hiei at the same time, if their expressions were any clue. Hiei turned around and they looked at each other furiously.

“We’re being watched,” they said in unison. Bitter hatred glazed Kurama’s emerald eyes, and Hiei didn’t appear to be too pleased, either.

“The whip shop,” Kurama voiced after a moment of raging silence. “We should have gone. I knew it.”

“You didn’t,” Hiei replied scornfully. “If you had, we would have gone.”

Yuusuke and Kuwabara watched, wide-eyed, as the two demons figured out in seconds what had taken them nearly a quarter of an hour. Neither spoke, but both listened intently as Hiei and Kurama appeared to forget their presence.

“Well,” Kurama was saying, “we have to go now. There’s clearly a clue there.”

Yuusuke saw his opening and snuck in to the conversation. “If she’s not there herself.”

Hiei shook his head and Yuusuke felt his pride dashed a bit. “No,” the hiyoukai said. “She wouldn’t be. This entire mission has been a wild chase; it would never be this simple. Miru knew Kurama and I would figure out her clue easily.”

So she had been to the mansion, Yuusuke thought, but kept it to himself for fear of sounding even more ignorant.

“All right,” Kuwabara said hesitantly. “So now we go to the whip shop and find the clue she’s left us. Ah…right?”

Kurama nodded sharply and stood beside Hiei, keeping his eyes downcast.

“Now,” he said softly, “the real chase begins.”

The words held a heavy threat to them, and no one felt the need to question anything.

The bloodlust had begun.

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Hiyoukai: fire demon

Hirui: after watching the Japanese episodes 99 and 100, I realized that “Hiruseiki” is in fact an English dub for “hirui”

Ningenkai: human realm

Note: I admit, initially when I began this story, I had no idea what to call it. For some reason, “Balance” just popped into my head. But now I’ve got a reason to call it that! Yay! All shall rejoice! Or not, I don’t really care. Anyway, the pathetic excuse I’m going with is, you guessed it, Kurama’s emotional turmoil. Note the magic phrase: “His emotions…his mind…his heart was too torn down right now for any constant, any balance of that.” Since we’re in confessional mode and all that, I will also admit that when I began the story, I wanted Yuusuke and Kuwabara to have a more central role than Kurama and Hiei. But, well, it was just not meant to be.

Other note: I apologize if the initial mention of the eye-patterned body pile sounded like a convenient plot point. I did originally intend for it to show the gang their next clue, but obviously, they couldn’t have realized that right off, so I didn’t mention the direction the eye was looking.

Other, other note: the rhyme at the end of the dream sequence isn’t actually quoted from any version of “The Gingerbread Man” that I know of. It’s a line a friend of mine and I used to exchange as a kind of teaser when we were looking for someone we couldn’t find. When I recited it in my head, it sounded threatening in the way that all children’s rhymes are kind of creepy (and if you really think about it, it’s true).