Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Grief ❯ Black Tears ( Chapter 4 )

Four

Black Tears

 

Darkness…unending…consuming…the bringer of most nightmares…

Every time Sho felt her eyelids open, this was all that she could see. But she knew that she was not dead, for every time the exhausted she-demon tried to rest in the comfortable blackness that seemed to devour her once-bright world, quiet voices would speak softly in her ears; keeping the poison apparition from her desired demise.

Sho could still remember Shodi and Shoshoku, but, for reasons that she could not explain, she could not reach her half-spirits through the darkness. It was as if they had never existed… But then again, Sho could not even tap into her past memories. The only things that she could remember were her spirit companions, a man and a young woman swathed in black blood, and a pair of piercing, golden eyes.

* * *

“Well, somewhere be unhappiness and sadness.

I need to calculate;

What, creates my own madness…

And I am craving this disaster.

I feel irrational,

So confrontational,

To tell the truth I am

Getting away with murder.”

~Getting Away with Murder, Papa Roach

* * *

“Kurama, either you better start explaining, or I'm bashing heads!” The restless spirit detective stared in a bewildered fury at his suddenly silver-haired, golden-eyed companion.

“Yeah, why are you all `cat-like' all of a sudden?” Kuwabara added unnecessarily.

Once the she-demon had fallen, Kurama had wasted no time in bringing her to Genkai's temple. The other three straightened up all that had happened and—sadly—left the dead little girl closer to the city that she might be found. All the while, Yusuke never stopped his incessant glare of death at Sho; resenting Kurama's decision to show her leniency.

Yusuke shot bloody daggers at the orange-haired oaf, and then looked back to where the real Kurama sat looking over an unconscious she-demon. Yusuke's eyes passed over her scarcely breathing body—his anger igniting a thousand-fold—and was forced to turn away quickly. Yusuke smirked inwardly at this: he was actually afraid of his own anger.

The kitsune didn't answer, didn't look up—his weary golden eyes still staring worriedly at the young woman that had brought about his past-life memories, and had thus been the cause of his sudden demonic change.

It hurt him so much to see her like this. But the pain was not just from the physical wounds—no; those weren't what were causing the majority of her “coma” like state.

Her emotional scars were deeper than the fox could even begin to imagine. Every now and then, a tear would roll down her tightly closed eyelid. Sho had never cried…in fact…the girl he had known all those years ago, had hardly shown emotion…

And he knew the reason for that to be her tyrant-like father.

When Kuronue had died—centuries ago—Kurama had lost part of his spirit: part of the essence that had made him…well…him. But he still continued his bandit “duties,” and sustained his title as the “King of Thieves.”

But all that he had rebuilt came crashing down when an emotionally disturbed and vengeance driven Wind Master had come to his home.

Jin had known that Kurama had been her first mentor, and when the Wind Master told the kitsune bandit about her murder, and asked for help in his mad idea of vengeance, Kurama had felt the rest of his spirit shatter to a thousand shards of glass on the floor of his heart. To him, Sho was really like the daughter that he had always secretly wanted—no matter his outer cravings of lust and power. And now…that last link keeping him to who he was…was dead…

53 years later, he was shot down by a spirit hunter in his emptiness.

He shook the troubling thoughts from his mind, and watched the slight movement of her chest—rising just barely, and falling painfully.

How had she survived? Had the Wind Master lied?

No. Kurama knew that wasn't true.

He remembered the look in Jin's eyes the day he came to the fox's home.

* * *

The sun shone down upon the fox as he smiled for the first time, in a long time. A new prize drifted into his wandering thoughts—a golden sphere with rubies dotting its surface—when a face drifted into his mind: smirking eyes, and a pair of leathery black wings.

“Oh, Kuronue…I hope that you are happy, and can forgive me for that day…”

Just as the kitsune began to set out, the picture of his former partner in crime twisted suddenly, and the face of his old student, Sho, appeared, halting his stride.

Kurama attempted to shake the image from his mind, in vain, when a huge gust of wind billowed about his feet, and knocked the bandit king to his rump. Flustered, he stood up swiftly and glared hotly at a young man with fiery red hair that was approaching him sullenly.

“You could warn a person, you know!” he snapped coldly. His sour attitude was suddenly changed to confusion when he realized that he didn't even know this demon. “What do you want?”

“Are ye…Youko Kurama?” the young man asked in a quiet voice.

“And if I am?” Kurama answered back in smooth voice, “Are you here to hunt me, young Master of the Wind?”

The red-haired man looked up, and Kurama found himself taking a hesitant step back at the unbridled fury, and hidden sorrow in his sky-blue eyes.

“Me name is Jin…ye once trained a young girl by the name o' Sho, right?”

The image burst in the fox's head full-force as his golden eyes widened in astonishment.

“Yes…I did…” He looked down at Jin, who had lowered his eyes—the grief almost completely drowning out his anger.

“Did…did ye love `er?” he asked silently.

“Like my own daughter,” Kurama answered without hesitation.

Jin paused, his eyes full of a kind of regret, tinged with fury.

“She's dead.”

Even after knowing what the Wind Master was probably going to say, Kurama was not prepared for the abruptly crushing statement. Just as the grief that was lying in Jin's blue eyes began to take hold of the kitsune bandit, something inside him snapped. His irrationality—a side that he hardly ever let show—seized control of him as he reached forward and grasped the double straps criss-crossing over the Wind Master's chest, pulling the young man up with a startling strength so that the two were eye-level

“Did you kill her, boy?” he asked in a low hiss—all the while knowing that his own actions were completely out of reason and quite childish.

Never once did Jin flinch, and never once did he shrink away from the kitsune's growing wrath. He stared at the fox coldly at first, but as he opened his mouth to answer, the façade shattered away, and a yearning—a love—shone deeply in his troubled eyes.

“No…I would never be harmin' a hair on `er head…” his eyes darkened quickly, “Youko, I came here knowin' that ye'd probably take this news the same as I did. And now I need t' ask ye: will ye help me avenge `er?”

* * *

Kurama was shocked back to reality as a shrill scream pierced the air around him. He covered his over-sensitive ears protectively, and looked frantically around for the source of the screaming. His eyes fell over the wildly thrashing, yet still unconscious, Sho and instantly jumped up—his chair falling backwards.

He reached forward and attempted to calm the girl, but only succeeded in receiving some deep gouges in his arm.

She had extended her claws.

“Sho!! Wake up!! It's only a dream!!”

If she could truly hear him or not, Kurama did not know, but he guessed the latter from the fact that she was still screaming and flaying uncontrollably. His eyes roamed the room for something he could use to hopefully reach her, when his golden orbs landed on a coldly gazing Hiei in the corner—his hands clamped irritably over his ears.

“Hiei!” he cried out over the ear-piercing shrieking, “Please, Hiei!”

The Jaganshi scoffed at Kurama, and turned his head towards the wall with a “Hn.”

“I'm…I'm…” his arrogant instincts berated his thoughts as he forced out the rest of his words, “I'm begging you Hiei…please…”

The fire-koorime scowled, but did not turn from the pleading fox again. Stepping forward—glaring daggers at his kitsune companion the entire time—Hiei looked down at the now-sobbing—with an occasional wail of grief—poison apparition.

“Hold her arms back. If she gets those damned claws near me, I will kill you,” he threatened dangerously—no bluff apparent in either his voice or his glaring eyes.

Kurama nodded, and looked thankfully to the Jaganshi, before the small man placed his calloused hand on the she-demon's forehead, and his third, unnatural eye burned through the cloth wrapped around his forehead.

His Jagan eye focused on the demoness's mind, and soon he was consumed by the darkness.

* * *

Tears poured unseen down her face as she reached out for a dying, redheaded man. Blood poured from various wounds all over his body, and she wasn't able to reach him—something chaining her back. Yet whenever she tried to close her eyes from the sight, her eyelids became transparent.

She could not hide.

Sho struggled against her concealed bonds, screaming out to the man to run. But she knew he couldn't hear her.

Sho…

The voice was faint, but she heard it clearly. And somehow, she recognized it.

It's only a dream…

A dream? No…it was too real…too…true…

A bright flash of light to her left went unnoticed as Hiei's incorporeal form dropped down in a heap. He shook away the dizziness from his “spell” and looked over to where a bound Sho wrestled against invisible chains. Her eyes were trained before her, into the unending blackness that consumed her mind. Hiei approached her, and placed his hand on her shoulder—his eyes suddenly being open to the image that was causing the girl to cry out.

His spell wearing off, Hiei didn't have enough time to even be confused as he and the sobbing girl were washed out into a brilliant white light…

* * *

Kurama's ears perked up suddenly just as Hiei fell back, and Sho stopped thrashing. Breathing heavily, Hiei scowled at his kitsune companion, and was gone in the blink of an eye.

A groan brought his attention back to Sho as her eyes fluttered open. Her crimson orbs looked up at him, studying him for a moment, and then looked around at the room capacitating the pair—Yusuke and Kuwabara having left long before when Kurama hadn't answered them.

Her scarlet eyes rested on him once more, and suddenly, before the fox could react, Sho's arms were around him in a much-needed embrace. He returned the hug, allowing silence to surround them as Sho pulled him close—seeming afraid that he would leave.

“Youko…he…he's dead…”

Her voice had broken the stillness so abruptly that Kurama hadn't even realized that she was looking up at him now, her eyes full of tears once more.

“What do you mean?” he asked softly.

“He killed him…he killed them all…just like he killed me…”