Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Balance ❯ Be All Right ( Chapter 33 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Disclaimer: today was a complete waste of a day… I feel bad.
Balance
Chapter Thirty-Three: Be All Right
The man in the mirror looked away, tracking some invisible trail through the concrete below them. Red eyes, still cracked, flickered in interesting ways under some invisible light that belonged only to them.
‘So then why do you work so hard to protect them?’
Well, I…
He fumbled for an answer, casting around for something, anything, to say that would make him sound right, keep him in control.
Keep?
More like place.
I owe them something, he said, hoping he sounded confident. I owe the woman for taking me in when I lost my life in Makai and for keeping me even without knowing what I really am, I owe the world for not shunning me when I am withdrawn into myself. I cannot shun them or leave them to die without paying my debts.
What a funny notion.
He did not leave any place without paying debts, true. It was the fox’s honor binding him to such things. Foxes were oh so confusing–tricksters like no other, but tied down by certain rules; regulations, in a sense. Reality for them was a fragile thing, made up of these rules which were made to be twisted and snuck around.
But what debt did he really owe these creatures, these humans? Was he inventing an excuse to hide a more personal reason?
‘Are you afraid of telling me why you really defend them all?’
Of course not!
‘Of why you really stay there?’
Why would I have reason to be afraid?
‘Of why you really care?’
I don’t recall ever saying that I cared for these miserable lowlifes.
‘That’s right, it’s only written all across your face.’
I owe them nothing!
The man in the mirror did not reply to that, and he merely waited, his eyes raging with vivid fire he thought only tangible in the flowing light itself. He was furious–at himself, nonetheless, something that simply could not be.
He never contradicted himself, after all.
‘I thought you remained with them because, and only because, you owed them for taking you in,’ said Fear, smirking devilishly.
Haven’t you realized yet? he asked pleadingly. I don’t know what I am anymore! I don’t know what I am, I don’t know who you are, I don’t know where my friends have gone, I don’t know when I lost track of all this, I don’t know why anything is the way it is! I don’t even know what I know anymore!
Opportunities for power here were rare and sporadic, and Fear saw this one clear as a moonlit night.
‘Don’t know what you know?’ Fear asked soothingly.
He nodded, holding tears behind tightly clamped lids.
‘Losing control?’
You know I am! Bastard! This is all your fault!
‘You know that isn’t true,’ Fear said soothingly, his voice almost hypnotic. ‘But your control is slipping, is it not? You want an easy answer to all your problems, don’t you?’
I do, I do, I do… he murmured, one arm flung over his eyes.
Then, with startling new resolution, he screamed at the top of his lungs.
But I can’t! I can’t do that to myself! I can’t do that to anyone else, I can’t let that happen.
‘Certainly you can.’
No I can’t!
‘Submit to your fears, and everything will be all right.’
NO!
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“Hajime!” Miru shouted. Kurama did not echo the order, but rather spit on the ground and drew his Rose Whip.
“Come at me,” he snarled.
Miru raised an eyebrow at the new tone the match had taken. She had called the power of the choir as her own means of combat, and that horrible wolf creature was still struggling against its bonds behind her… If Kurama was breaking character and using his weapon so early into the fight, she would do the same.
Opening her mouth slightly, she let a soft note fall from her lips. The last remains of the tree’s roots, still tightly bound to the dirt and concrete, twined themselves up, up, into the creature, becoming its hind paws. Shaking itself from head to tail, the monster bared its teeth in a feral growl, then opened its jaws fully to roar like no other.
Kurama paused, arms held up in defensive posture and his whip ready to strike. The creature continued to rumble its protest of Kurama’s existence, lumbering forward and becoming accustomed to its form.
“Kurama!” Yuusuke shouted, and Hiei shifted his weight, ready to block the man if he tried to rush in and help.
The fox let his eyes flicker to Yuusuke as the monster became used to walking, beginning to trot.
Yuusuke paused, as if uncertain how to articulate his point. Finally he gave a confident smile and a thumbs-up.
“Knock ‘em dead, Kurama.”
The fox smiled slightly in response, still not looking at his friend.
The creature was cantering now, clumsily lurching for Kurama with every motion of its large paws. Thick claws tore rows in the ground as it passed and Miru watched with a satisfied smirk. Her voice was silent now, and she only looked on with a strange pride as her monster bounded nearly gleefully to its target, saliva beginning to drip from its panting mouth and its tongue lapping at its chops in anticipation.
Kurama shifted his weight just slightly to his back foot. Hiei’s eyes snapped from his friend to the beast and back again. Kurama couldn’t be planning to take on that thing with his whip, it was a ridiculous idea.
No, that wasn’t it–he was trying to trick the thing. A seed was nestled between his forefinger and thumb…but the creature was made of tree, how would a seed stop it?
“Juryo Youzanken!” Kurama snarled (so it had been a rose seed?), not so much because the attack needed a name, Hiei knew–he had seen Kurama use it a few times, and never had he blurted those words. So then it was…because of his need to prove himself? To prove that his attacks were just as good, just as strong, and just as malleable as Miru’s.
But that didn’t make sense. Kurama’s moves were very malleable, that was well known. The thorns of his whips were deadly sharp and very easy for him to use.
Was he speaking to the beast, or to the girl?
And weren’t they one and the same?
Hiei shook it off and continued to watch. Kurama had leapt up and stabbed at the tree thing, and was now perched on its back, repeatedly jabbing at its tough hide. The thing was snapping back over its shoulder, trying to bite Kurama and throw him off, but the fox was too agile to be caught.
The sharp point of the glove seemed to be doing nothing, though, and Kurama growled his frustration and withdrew the whips. He searched his mind frantically for a weapon, any weapon, and came up with nothing but “maybes.”
“Shokuyou Butsu!”
Kurama held the plant over the beast’s back, letting the acidic saliva drip down and burn into its flesh. The hide was remarkably thick, and no hole was formed even after enough acid to melt an entire demon to dust. Only a dent grew there, but the organs remained out of reach.
The dent deepened, burrowing down, down, down…
It didn’t have organs, Kurama suddenly realized. It was a creature made of wood and leaves, not of blood and water. The grass of death he had been planning to use next would be useless, only strengthening the monster.
Miru cackled joyfully, quite unlike her previous laughter. She seemed to take great pleasure in being able to make such maniacal noises.
“The only earth around for miles, and I’ve pitted it against you!” she shouted. “You can’t beat it, and you can’t beat me! You’re not strong enough to break its skin without plants, but plants are useless!”
“They…are…not,” Kurama said haltingly as realization crept up on him. Miru controlled the beast–it had a mind of its own, yes, but Miru had created it and was sending it to attack him. If he stopped her, the creature would run off to live in the city, or the forest, or the barren planes, or wherever it made its home until a fire monster or some such thing came along and killed it.
Catapulting himself up, Kurama drew his floating plant and glided across the sky to stop above Miru. He nose dived, his whip summoned from nowhere and held out at his side.
Thrashing it down, he attempted to wrap it around the girl’s throat and decapitate her, but Miru’s reflexes were finely tuned to make up for her lacking strength. She turned at the last moment and let out several panicked notes, her skin taking on a funny sheen.
The whip snaked around her neck, but did not cut the skin.
Then several things happened at once. The monster, still set on knocking Kurama down, barreled towards him and pawed him out of the sky. Unprepared for the blow, Kurama dropped his whip and fell for the ground, his floating plant in tatters. Miru jumped backwards, leaving the whip around her neck in her haste, and sang to the monster, presumable an order to kill Kurama.
When the dust settled, the creature had Kurama pinned under its massive paw and Miru was sauntering forwards, the whip left at her throat now as a kind of badge of pride. As if to say, “I bested the great Kurama,” she flung the tail of it like a boa.
“The fox has become the prey,” she teased, kneeling down to him in a patronizing way. “How does it feel, Kurama? To be the one on the ground, the one fearing for his life, the one at my mercy. Doesn’t it make you feel so alive?”
“I can hardly see how I would feel alive as I lie here fearing for my life,” he snapped, catching her doublespeak. She tilted her head and made a resentful face.
“That’s the problem with you,” she said. “You’re too literal. Remember way back when, you came upon me in a forest running from an explosion? That explosion nearly blew off my head. You nearly blew off my head, ya bastard. Well, see, the thing is, you got real confused. You thought I had caused the explosion. But that’s stupid! Why would I nearly blow off my own head?”
“You made mistakes,” Kurama muttered, his eyes darting up to the monster holding him to the floor. The concrete had to be bad for its paws, and it looked bored and uncomfortable. Maybe…
“Yes, but I don’t make mistakes,” she stressed. “I have God himself on my side. He believes in me as the savior of demonkind and mankind alike, and he will guide me to glory.”
Kurama blinked a few times. She was certainly an advanced class of demon, to have thought up her own god and such a story for him and his relation to her. It all sounded like Christianity, a human concept, but with more self-satisfying twists.
“No one is perfect,” he said.
“I am,” she claimed arrogantly. “I’m perfect. Perfect looks, perfect power, perfect control. I have you beat, fox, and if you would accept it, I could kill you and get on with my life.”
“Get on with your life–!”
“So not the point,” she interrupted, waving him off. “If you will say that I have defeated you, sign a legal document, and tell me where you keep your fucking seeds so I can have one as a souvenir, then I’ll kill you and this nightmare will be over.”
“You make it sound like such an appealing proposition,” Kurama said, hiding his desperation for time. The creature was definitely tired of holding him by now, he might be able to throw it and run before it bit him…
“Don’t I just? Now, I’ll need some of your blood to make it a binding contract, so if you wouldn’t mind…”
She held out a knife and a small inkwell, looking impatient.
If he asked her to call off her beast so he could cut himself properly, she would surely tie him down some other way. But the scent of blood would attract the monster’s attention, so he couldn’t cut himself while pinned or he’d be eaten. He had to throw it off now, before anything else happened.
Squirming just a little bit, Kurama drew a seed from the crushed floating plant pinned to his side and let it burst into life. The wing-like leaves irritated the creature’s paw, just as Kurama had thought they would, and it loosened its hold even more. Arching his back, Kurama flung himself to the side and leapt away from them both.
Hiei nodded approvingly, and Yuusuke and Kuwabara whooped their glee. Kurama had almost forgotten about them, and tried to shut them out as the bits and pieces of a plan formed in his mind.
The whip was still around Miru’s neck. He wouldn’t need to get very close to carry her up, if he used another whip and snapped it to the one there. That monster thing would be a problem, as it was used to its body by now, but if he moved at the right angles, he could avoid it. He could summon the floating plant mid-jump, and as long as he bound the whips around her arms and legs, she couldn’t struggle free.
Yes, yes, this might work.
Miru rushed forward, apparently tired of all the pausing and procrastination Kurama was doing.
“You’re going down, fox boy!” she shouted in a horrible burst of her uncreative side. Kurama didn’t pause in his thoughts, but rather charged her at the exact same speed she charged him. He kept his head down to cut wind resistance, his arms out at his side to add to his already streamlined form. Miru’s mouth was open as she prepared to sic her monster on Kurama once again.
They were within three yards of each other and gaining fast–Kurama jumped into the air and snapped out his whip in the same fluid motion, cracking it in such a way that the end of it wove into the end of the whip still lying around Miru’s throat. Still midair, he summoned his floating plant and flattened his body against the leaves, flying upwards. Miru sang out impatiently to the monster, and it swatted its claws at the pair of them, nearly dragging her back down. Kurama yanked her out of harm’s way, hearing her shoulder pop out of its socket with the harsh motion.
Miru grimaced at the discomfort, biting her lip and squinting one eye. Kurama didn’t look down to notice that.
Wind currents were generous, lifting the plant higher and higher. Of course, Yuusuke idly firing a Rei Gan in one direction and Hiei blasting a ring of fire in another might have had something to do with that, but Kurama didn’t see them, either.
Miru looked up at him with confusion and anger in her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she shouted. He let his eyes flicker down to her for a mere moment.
“Taking you somewhere where songs are meaningless,” he replied quietly, so that she had to strain to hear him.
She squinted against the air rushing by her face.
“There is no such place!” she shouted, the slightest layer of panic underneath her voice. “Not unless you take us into the stratosphere, but there, you would die!”
“Not necessarily,” he hissed through the thinning air. She began to panic visibly now, but a fall from this height–how had they come so far off the ground?–would certainly kill her.
She couldn’t breath properly… The air was thin… Her monster tree thing was roaring below them with an unmatched and now bridled rage… She couldn’t sing or make any sound at all…
That was his plan, of course.
But up here, Kurama had to be affected by the thinning air, as well. She could barely breath, and he, who so depended on plants, would need more oxygen even than her.
She stole a glance up at her tormenting prey.
He had a leafy, mask-like plant fastened to his mouth.
She choked, trying to gasp or scream or something to express how horribly unfair it was that he could do that. The bare molecules of oxygen she managed to gather caught in her throat and she instinctively hacked the irritation away, only creating more scratchiness.
Her head was feeling light and she couldn’t think straight.
But…wait…that had to be his real plan. Get her to a place where she couldn’t use her magic, then have her faint before he let her back down.
The pair of them dipped down a meter or so in the sky, and Miru felt the hold on her wrists quiver.
Kurama wasn’t getting weaker, was he?
Half desperate, half muddled thinking, Miru let her head loll to one side as though she had passed out. Kurama’s hold shifted again, and she felt them drop another few meters. He was weakening faster than she had thought, maybe even faster than she was. Sure enough, a few moments after she faked unconsciousness, Kurama let the wind currents carry them back to the ground. As oxygen returned and they passed through the clouds, Miru felt her head clearing. It was true, she was still weak and tipsy, but she could form coherent thought now.
Kurama let her fall to the ground with a soft “thump.”
“Ai-i-i-i…” she muttered, rubbing her backside. Kurama did a double take as he tossed away his faux oxygen mask.
“You–you can’t be awake, not after that…” he said, struggling only a little with his speech. She glared up at him.
“I can…survive without my music, you know,” she muttered with a hint of insult and an overtone of panting. “It’s just…annoying.”
Her creature skulked towards Kurama, a practically impossible feat considering its size and mass. Not to mention its earth-shaking growls.
The fox tensed and turned his head.
Miru chuckled.
“Got you,” Kurama muttered, bending his knees slightly.
“No way,” Miru whispered.
But Kurama was as good as his word; leaping up–not as high as he might have, after that impressive glider incident–he took a seat atop the monster and placed his hands flat on its neck (or, what he assumed to be its neck; it was hard to tell, what with the rough skin and misshapen form). Hands glowing pink, he forced energy into the thing’s body, letting the excess roll off of him in waves and wash over its hindquarters and back.
As was only to be expected, the tree creature thrashed about at first, trying to throw the almost viral invasion off of him. Hiei’s hand rested on the hilt of his katana unexpectedly, and Yuusuke and Kuwabara found themselves automatically prepping their weapons once again.
But then the thing’s motion simply stopped. Smirking, Kurama brought up his hands in a “goal” position and summoned several woven Rose Whips, throwing them over its muzzle as a reigns-style harness.
“No!” Miru shouted, somehow calling up the energy in her weakened state. “That’s! Not! Fair! Stop it, you’re supposed to be playing by the rules and that’s against the rules!”
Kurama smiled kindly as he jerked the reign-whips. The creature was still wild, even with the addition of his plant energy. “Like it or not,” he called down to her, “this beast of yours is made of a tree. I control plants, including trees. You made your second mistake.”
“My first being what?” Miru whined, pouting.
“Getting me angry, of course.”
Miru glanced around, panicked for a moment, before snapping her eyes back to Kurama with a sneer to match.
“Not if I add some concrete.”
Kurama blinked as Miru opened her mouth.
She sang a few toneless notes, a song of strength and rebuilding new from old. Pavement rose from the ground and buildings lost their roofs as she tore concrete from here and there, throwing it at her creature. It howled as she melded wood to stone, resulting in a patchy color of grey and brown.
Kurama felt his hold on the other’s mentality slipping.
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Juryo Youzanken: Tree Spirit Demon Slash Punch, a glove formed by wrapping several Rose Whips around the user’s arm
Shokuyou Butsu: Death Tree, a demon realm plant which eats demon meat
Rei Gan: Spirit Gun
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