Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Reflection ❯ Mirror ( Chapter 1 )

You finish taping the gauze to the last scrape, and finally bring yourself to look in the mirror. The sight before you isn't a new one, you're used to seeing yourself bruised beyond recognition. Your eyes blink back at you, tired but elated. You don't like your appearance after a fight, but then you don't like your appearance at the best of times so it's not that big a deal. What you do

like is the way your eyes shine back at you, beaten but determined. Every time you swear you'll beat him next time, every time you fall again, but your pattern recognition has never been good. And you like to think your eyes show the world your sureness, the positivity that comes from having a goal. You have one goal, every day one goal, and you live for the now because you're surrounded on all sides by people who've got so much, too much future that you won't have.

There's the delinquent-cum-demon lord, he of the cocky attitude and the slicked-back black hair, except of course when he's got too much hair to keep slicked back. You wouldn't pick him out if he walked down the street (well, most people wouldn't, he's got too much power for you personally not to notice him) and that bothers you because he's got more power in his fingers than the whole human world combined. He's open, wears all his emotions on his sleeve, shows everything amplified in dark brown shining eyes. You've seen everything there is to feel in those eyes, a focal point for reckoning his power and his ties to the world, everything with the exception of fear, and part of the reason (aside from not wanting to lose your drive) that you don't *really* want to beat him is that you're afraid that somehow he might be scared, and if he showed fear your whole world would have to be rethought. He doesn't want it, not that he hates it but he never asked for it, but he's the unquestioned best, and he's got the time to do anything he wants with it though you can tell from the way the cockiness softens when he looks at her that he doesn't want all that time and power, just a short fleeting life and a long solid love.

His love, you don't know her well but it's fun to watch her beat him up, which she does so easily, and you can see the softness in her and in him toward her even as she attacks. She's one like you who's a small important part in a life that will outlast too many things, but not love. Never love, not what those two have together. Her eyes are simple and honest and beautiful, light and calm except when narrowed in anger, and the mind behind them can run circles around yours or his. It's amazing that she puts up with him but then you put up with him too so what does that say about both of you? Doesn't really matter, he's got a pull that attracts people to him, friends or enemies or lovers.

A pull like the fox has in his androgynous beauty, all fire-red hair and leaf-green eyes, all *alive*, except he scares you because half the time his eyes aren't green like grass they're green like glass, sharp and dangerous and cold like emeralds, and when he's like that you're all too sure that he's just playing some huge game with all of you. Green glass telling secrets, showing that he's too old to bear the body he does, reminding you that everyone you care about is only an ant on his pathway, because he's been here a hundred times longer than you have and he'll be here a hundred times that after you're gone. Sometimes the softer grass shows, and it's then that you know he's still partially human however much most of him resists it. But you've never seen him

keep that look for too long, only in little fleeting moments when no one's watching because when people are watching he's got a mask firmly in place, a half-smile and a sweet voice that fool almost everyone but not you because no matter how many people call you stupid you are not unobservant and you can tell something's true when it's obvious. You wonder if anyone else notices this about you or sees what you see in him. Does it reflect in your eyes when you figure out something that most other people would've known, or would've accepted and overlooked?

Fox goes with the psychopathic fire demon, they just fit together fox/dragon dragon/fox, the demon whose eyes make him look like the little kid he never has been. Well, that until you get close, because no one who looked into that blood-red could ever call him a kid. His eyes tell you stories, he's a fighter and he always has been and he learned early on the warrior's way of dealing with pain, learned to lock it away during the fight and wait until you have time to let it out later and hurt then, but either he forgets the last part or he's never finished his battle. Dangerous, unstable, and too quick with an insult as well as with a movement, he's as prickly as his hair looks and you can tell he's made himself deal with his solitude by forcing everyone to hate him before they can learn to like him. He's more obvious than the redhead and he doesn't manipulate people, you think that's part of the strangely complex honor code they say he has, and you admit to yourself that you could probably be friends with him if you didn't fight with him every time you saw him.

Fire demon leads to his sister, (they think you don't know, but they forget you can see the threads that tie people together and there's a bright silver one between the two of them) the most beautiful girl-woman you've ever seen, because most things lead you to thoughts of her. Sweet and calm and innocent and ice-blue, by rights she shouldn't be so friendly with you but she's one of two people who call you by your given name these days, as warm through her ice as her brother is cold through his fire. You can see the threads between you and her as well and with every tiny indication, you can see a red thread getting stronger, you know you're destined for her and she for you. Perfect girl, sweet but sad, why doesn't he tell her because she'd be so much happier then, you wish you could make her smile more (though you do a lot, mostly through your own stupidity around her but how can you help it really) and you hope and you wish you can make her happier but she won't truly be `til she figures out what everyone else knows.

Ice-blue always reminds you of little death, genki reaper, the smiling laughing kittenish girl who was pretty enough to make you stupid once but these days you don't pay much attention to her (except when she's being weirder than usual). You see the happiness and it's real but there's also something else there: she acts upbeat all the time so she won't cry so much, so she won't have time to think, so her job won't get to her. No one knows how old she is (probably she doesn't even know) and she's spent all that time with few friends, with only one love, a love who's indifferent and spoiled and drives you and her and everyone insane. Happy eyes, manic energy, bouncing hair, graceful kimono, bright clothes, wild flight, this is what you know of her and it seems likely to stay that way.

Probably the only person who knows her better is her boss, child-god of the Reikai, your boss too in some sense you suppose. Seven hundred years old, another one to whom you mean fifty years maybe and then some paperwork, an idiot in ways different from the way people mean it when they call you one but still an idiot. Child prodigy, intelligent without being smart, same beauty as the fox when he's adult formed without the cleverness to go with those cat-eyes, massive power without knowing how to use it well in your estimation. You wonder if he's ever let anything happen to him, let anyone touch him, you doubt he's ever truly been hurt because he's the son of a god and you don't piss off the gods, you doubt he's ever truly been hurt because the smirk in his voice when he's got so little to smirk about and the callousness of his words to the one who loves him aren't the voice and the words of one who knows what life is like.

Many people know what life is more than he does and one of those who knows the most is the old hag/fighter priestess/sometimes young girl, she was beautiful once and she still is if you know what to look for. Sarcastic, irritable, she gives you the creeps sometimes though you know she wouldn't hurt you, it's just all that power concentrated in what at first appears to be a decrepit body gives you a feeling at odds with the rest of what you know. She's accepted her own humanity in a way you admire but don't think you'll be able to emulate, but who knows you still have enough time for your opinion to change.

You laugh at yourself and shake your head, breaking eye contact with your reflection. What would your sister think if she saw you staring at your reflection like some anxious teenager before his first date? She knows you're not given to introspection, she knows you only get this quiet when you've lost again and she'll just laugh at you. Much like you are doing to yourself, maybe it doesn't really matter, but you don't want her intruding on your thhoughts. Much as you love he she can be a real pain sometimes and too perceptive.

You put the medicine away and close the cabinet, wink at your reflection in the glass. Tomorrow you'll meet your goal, always tomorrow, always because you've never made will never make never want to make it now.