(no subject)
Jul. 19th, 2004 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Mwa. Have been sorting through my "tub of inherited floss" in an attempt to color match the green my mother used on one (incomplete) corner of this tablecloth when she started it decades ago. So far my attempts have been futile, meaning I may have to go find the box labelled "embroidery" and take the rest of the floss out. Because I'm pretty sure I have every single color in existance.
EDIT: Success! Have found the green!
In the meantime, because I'm in a mood to post long-unfinished works in the hope that it'll get me writing on them, I give to y'all a YYH piece which goes along the lines of "what if Kurama and Shuuichi were made separate?"
Kurama was caught unaware.
Which was never a good thing.
The exorcist he didn't recognize, but the style of magic he did--onmyoudo. The room stank of the ritual magic. It was unfortunately effective: trying to escape the talismanic boundaries of his cage had resulted in blinding lights and stinging burns. And the chanting was starting to get on his nerves. Furthermore, whoever was doing this to him hadn't failed to catch his weak link.
His human family were being held captive in full view of the proceedings.
Kurama's mother and step-father, bound and gagged, were wide-eyed and scared. Shuuichi-kun, though, wasn't unaware of Kurama's true nature; his step-brother had remembered some of what had happened to him around the time of the Makai tournament and been able to resist Kurama's herbs of forgetfulness. Kurama had been forced to trust him with the truth.
He resolutely ignored the fact that he'd considered killing Shuuichi-kun to save his secret. That had been someone else, like a dream. He was well aware of his darker side, but he'd been in the human world so long that he preferred to ignore it.
Maybe Yuusuke was rubbing off on him.
Yuusuke would be able to escape from this cage with a sheer flex of power. Kurama was nowhere near S-class. And the chanting was giving him a splitting headache. He knew what the purpose of the ritual was, of course. Exorcism.
It was succeeding.
He could feel it becoming harder and harder for him to maintain a grip on reality, on his own mind. He was being evicted from his own body--from Minamino Shuuichi's body. Kurama had lived in this body its entire life, from conception onwards. He knew every vein and artery, every pulse of the heart and motion of the limbs. He knew every cell, and had rooted himself deep into them. He was no mere passing spirit. This was his body, and he was not letting go without a fight.
If they ripped him apart, tore his spirit free of this mortal flesh....
Kurama had no doubts about his own survival.
Minamino Shuuichi, however, was another question.
A maple sapling grown to intertwine with an ancient pine, Shuuichi would almost certainly be killed.
"You'll kill him," he growled in low tones to the man who stood chanting.
Unfortunately, the man didn't seem to care.
Kurama hated magicians who did not see the reprecussions** of their spells. If only he could have a talk with the Sumeragi, point him in the direction of this fellow....
A word, a knot binding the spell, made Kurama wince and crumple, clutching his head. His vision was splitting, becoming gray and striated.
He wanted to lash back... to lash out... but....
He was contained, trapped by his own nature. The spells bound him, split him. He could not summon plant for weapon nor for shield. Even illusion lay out of his leashed reach. A fox should not be leashed, he thought muzzily, aware of the hot tears that lay on his cheeks. He could see his mother, his stepfather, his stepbrother. He could see the horror, the terror in their eyes.
Nausea pinned him to the floor. As he was shoved from his body, Kurama could only whisper a name.
"Inari-sama."
~*~
Whether or not his god had heard him, Kurama did not know. What he did know was he woke up, his face on the cold cement floor, the barriers that had held him nothing more than a spider's webbing.
He always forgot, when in his weak human form, just what he was really capable of.
Plants boiled from nothingness around the exorcist, trapping him as Kurama had been trapped, catching his hands, a vine looping each finger, a leaf wrapping over his mouth, his body bound cruciform to a stout trunk.
Levering himself up, Kurama froze.
Long black locks spilled across his hands.
A limp form lay on the ground next to him.
It wore his face.
And it was fading fast.
His hands were pale, strong, with pointed nails.
And the silken hair spilled across them was black.
He glared up at the exorcist, whose mute terror showed in his eyes. "I should kill you," he spat. Instead, he gathered up Minamino Shuuichi--for so long his other half and now only a weak spirit uprooted within his own body--in his arms, checking carefully for pulse, breath, the shiver of spirit that so few mortals could hear.
He was anxious. This one couldn't die. Not so soon, not so quickly.
They'd barely known each other. A mere twenty years.
And he was cold, the gentleness which had blanketed him gone. Yuusuke would be appalled.
"Live," he willed in a growl, trying to remember the affixative plants. Makai mandoraga? No, it would poison a human. Reikai moonflower? No, that would curse Shuuichi with aging immortality. The Mirror of Darkness would work, had already worked once for Kurama, but it would kill him instead and more importantly, it was locked up again in the Reikai treasury, too far away for Kurama to get in time even if he'd been allowed its use.
He heard the sound of geta before he saw the elaborately embroidered pink of her hem.
"You can't have him, Botan," he said, cradling Shuuichi's body in his arms. "He's not ready."
She knelt down next to him. "I can't change what's written in the book," she reproved, eyes gentle. "You know that, Kurama."
He didn't want to hate her. He didn't want to kill her. She was only doing her job. She had no power over these things. Yet--
"He hasn't loved," he said softly, hoping, just once, for the universe to take pity on him. /Inari-sama..../
Botan held a bamboo cup in her hands. She offered it to him.
"What is it?" he asked, accepting.
"His fate," she replied. It could have been good or evil for all her intonation.
Closing his eyes, Kurama thought one last prayer to the god whose avatar he was, then opened his eyes and tilted the hollow stem so that the liquid within passed Shuuichi's lips.
It was his only hope. His last hope.
~*~
The human choked on the liquid. It was probably burning its way down his throat, filling his lungs with noxious vapors....
Shuuichi opened black-brown eyes. His skin now was as pale as Kurama's own, last week's beach tan drained out of him. He was moonlight and shadow.
"Kurama...?" he whispered.
"You're safe," Kurama said in relief. "Stay here." He laid Shuuichi back onto the ground. Kitten-weak, the black-haired human looked confusedly at Botan, his voice questioning her name next. Kurama stood and prowled over to the onmyouji.
"Why?" he spat, ripping the leaf that covered the man's mouth.
"Abomination," the man spat back. "Using that boy for your own foul purposes--"
"Monster?" Kurama questioned, voice restrained from the true rage he felt. "Demon? I assure you, I've heard them all before. Tell me, if the Sumeragi himself refused to exorcise me and risk the life of Minamino Shuuichi, who are you to try to kill him?" Gold eyes glittered in the darkness.
The man gaped like a breathless fish.
"For Subaru's sake, I'll spare you. He doesn't like his people being killed. Be assured, though, that he will know about you. And he's much less... gentle... these days than he used to be."
A bamboo leaf, its edge razor-sharp, was a blade in Kurama's hand. He held it to the man's neck, pressing until blood flowed. He dipped a finger in that red liquid, drew a quick character on the onmyouji's neck, and said a very old word. The mark glowed briefly. "If you transgress again," he murmured, "know that the beloved of Inari take great pride in vengeance."
~*~
If Kurama had a hobby, Hiei thought irritably, it was making his life difficult. At the moment he was stuck baby-sitting Minamino Shuuichi while Yuusuke and The Fool went out into the forest that bordered this town, trying to find wherever it was that Kurama had hidden himself. Worse yet, this nursemaid request had come from Koenma and Hiei was still on probation with the Reikai so he couldn't just ignore it. Thus he was wasting a perfectly good night just sitting in a tree outside a human hospital, keeping an eye on a powerless human.
Who finally sighed, closed the book he'd been reading, stood up, and walked to the window of his room, opening it. "Hiei," he called, "I know you're there. Come inside if you want." Then he went back to the bed and curled his legs beneath himself while he waited.
Hiei disliked being summoned, but--
It must have seemed to the human that he appeared inside the room out of nowhere, but Shuuichi only smiled at him as though he'd been anticipated.
"How did you know I was there?" Hiei asked. No one should have been able to sense him, not even Kurama, who this human decidedly was not.
"Who else would Koenma have set to watch me?" the human asked with a casual shrug. "I thought you must be bored. I'll read to you if you like."
"I can read for myself." Kurama had taught him how to read Japanese years before.
"Yes, I know, but will you?"
Shuuichi had him there. "No," Hiei admitted.
The human smiled. "Sit, then, and you can listen."
Hiei grudgingly perched on the open windowsill, thinking anything had to be better than doing guard duty alone.
~*~
Kurama neither raised a paw nor opened an eye as his friends came arrow-straight towards his new den, Kuwabara leading Yuusuke with his unerring psychic sense. Instead the thorny rose vines that barred entrance to the small cave stirred, thickened with a whisper. The pair of them stopped a short distance away from that barrier. Kurama pondered how he could send a more clear message of "go away," but gave up on dissuading them when Yuusuke flopped into a cross-legged position on the ground. If Yuusuke was one thing, it was stubborn. If it took him an eternity, he still wouldn't leave until he'd convinced Kurama to come out and go back with them.
All of which did not mean that Kurama intended to make it easy for him. So he waited and listened.
~*~
"Kuwabara-kun would be a Hufflepuff, I think," Shuuichi mused. "Yuusuke, though, screams Gryffindor."
"You'd be a Ravenclaw," Hiei opined from where he was still perched on the windowsill. It was starting to become light outside, but he hadn't moved all night. Shuuichi had actually seen him start relaxing into the story halfway through the book and had hidden a small smile, continuing to read. He suspected he was starting to get Hiei to like him as a separate individual from Kurama.
"You want people to think you're a Slytherin, but you're more like a Gryffindor too," Shuuichi retorted.
"What about Kurama?"
The question hung in the air between the two of them for a moment.
"I think," Shuuichi slowly answered, "that he'd be a Slytherin... he looks for what's of the best advantage to him. He's ruthless. But he's not evil. I know there are a few people he'd do anything for."
"Yuusuke."
"You, too," Shuuichi said, drawing Hiei's eyes to himself. He smirked, knowing things the Jaganshi didn't. "He'd do about anything for you and Kuwabara-kun."
"What would I do for you?" a deep voice suddenly asked. Shuuichi jumped and Hiei half-uncurled from his position, hand on sword. Kurama, tall and silver, melted out of the shadows in the corner of the hospital room. Hiei relaxed. Shuuichi, though, found that he couldn't keep his eyes off of the fox spirit who for so long had been his other half.
"Kurama," he greeted finally as the youko perched on the foot of his bed, fluffy tail twitching about to curl around his waist and onto Kurama's lap.
"Shuuichi." Kurama reached across the distance between them and threaded his fingers through dark bangs to touch Shuuichi's forehead. It was only a moment of touch, then he drew back again. "You seem better."
"No thanks to three days of hospital food. I'd give anything for a good bowl of ramen."
Kurama grinned, showing far too many teeth. "Hit Yuusuke up when you get out. He said he'd give you some free."
EDIT: Success! Have found the green!
In the meantime, because I'm in a mood to post long-unfinished works in the hope that it'll get me writing on them, I give to y'all a YYH piece which goes along the lines of "what if Kurama and Shuuichi were made separate?"
Kurama was caught unaware.
Which was never a good thing.
The exorcist he didn't recognize, but the style of magic he did--onmyoudo. The room stank of the ritual magic. It was unfortunately effective: trying to escape the talismanic boundaries of his cage had resulted in blinding lights and stinging burns. And the chanting was starting to get on his nerves. Furthermore, whoever was doing this to him hadn't failed to catch his weak link.
His human family were being held captive in full view of the proceedings.
Kurama's mother and step-father, bound and gagged, were wide-eyed and scared. Shuuichi-kun, though, wasn't unaware of Kurama's true nature; his step-brother had remembered some of what had happened to him around the time of the Makai tournament and been able to resist Kurama's herbs of forgetfulness. Kurama had been forced to trust him with the truth.
He resolutely ignored the fact that he'd considered killing Shuuichi-kun to save his secret. That had been someone else, like a dream. He was well aware of his darker side, but he'd been in the human world so long that he preferred to ignore it.
Maybe Yuusuke was rubbing off on him.
Yuusuke would be able to escape from this cage with a sheer flex of power. Kurama was nowhere near S-class. And the chanting was giving him a splitting headache. He knew what the purpose of the ritual was, of course. Exorcism.
It was succeeding.
He could feel it becoming harder and harder for him to maintain a grip on reality, on his own mind. He was being evicted from his own body--from Minamino Shuuichi's body. Kurama had lived in this body its entire life, from conception onwards. He knew every vein and artery, every pulse of the heart and motion of the limbs. He knew every cell, and had rooted himself deep into them. He was no mere passing spirit. This was his body, and he was not letting go without a fight.
If they ripped him apart, tore his spirit free of this mortal flesh....
Kurama had no doubts about his own survival.
Minamino Shuuichi, however, was another question.
A maple sapling grown to intertwine with an ancient pine, Shuuichi would almost certainly be killed.
"You'll kill him," he growled in low tones to the man who stood chanting.
Unfortunately, the man didn't seem to care.
Kurama hated magicians who did not see the reprecussions** of their spells. If only he could have a talk with the Sumeragi, point him in the direction of this fellow....
A word, a knot binding the spell, made Kurama wince and crumple, clutching his head. His vision was splitting, becoming gray and striated.
He wanted to lash back... to lash out... but....
He was contained, trapped by his own nature. The spells bound him, split him. He could not summon plant for weapon nor for shield. Even illusion lay out of his leashed reach. A fox should not be leashed, he thought muzzily, aware of the hot tears that lay on his cheeks. He could see his mother, his stepfather, his stepbrother. He could see the horror, the terror in their eyes.
Nausea pinned him to the floor. As he was shoved from his body, Kurama could only whisper a name.
"Inari-sama."
~*~
Whether or not his god had heard him, Kurama did not know. What he did know was he woke up, his face on the cold cement floor, the barriers that had held him nothing more than a spider's webbing.
He always forgot, when in his weak human form, just what he was really capable of.
Plants boiled from nothingness around the exorcist, trapping him as Kurama had been trapped, catching his hands, a vine looping each finger, a leaf wrapping over his mouth, his body bound cruciform to a stout trunk.
Levering himself up, Kurama froze.
Long black locks spilled across his hands.
A limp form lay on the ground next to him.
It wore his face.
And it was fading fast.
His hands were pale, strong, with pointed nails.
And the silken hair spilled across them was black.
He glared up at the exorcist, whose mute terror showed in his eyes. "I should kill you," he spat. Instead, he gathered up Minamino Shuuichi--for so long his other half and now only a weak spirit uprooted within his own body--in his arms, checking carefully for pulse, breath, the shiver of spirit that so few mortals could hear.
He was anxious. This one couldn't die. Not so soon, not so quickly.
They'd barely known each other. A mere twenty years.
And he was cold, the gentleness which had blanketed him gone. Yuusuke would be appalled.
"Live," he willed in a growl, trying to remember the affixative plants. Makai mandoraga? No, it would poison a human. Reikai moonflower? No, that would curse Shuuichi with aging immortality. The Mirror of Darkness would work, had already worked once for Kurama, but it would kill him instead and more importantly, it was locked up again in the Reikai treasury, too far away for Kurama to get in time even if he'd been allowed its use.
He heard the sound of geta before he saw the elaborately embroidered pink of her hem.
"You can't have him, Botan," he said, cradling Shuuichi's body in his arms. "He's not ready."
She knelt down next to him. "I can't change what's written in the book," she reproved, eyes gentle. "You know that, Kurama."
He didn't want to hate her. He didn't want to kill her. She was only doing her job. She had no power over these things. Yet--
"He hasn't loved," he said softly, hoping, just once, for the universe to take pity on him. /Inari-sama..../
Botan held a bamboo cup in her hands. She offered it to him.
"What is it?" he asked, accepting.
"His fate," she replied. It could have been good or evil for all her intonation.
Closing his eyes, Kurama thought one last prayer to the god whose avatar he was, then opened his eyes and tilted the hollow stem so that the liquid within passed Shuuichi's lips.
It was his only hope. His last hope.
~*~
The human choked on the liquid. It was probably burning its way down his throat, filling his lungs with noxious vapors....
Shuuichi opened black-brown eyes. His skin now was as pale as Kurama's own, last week's beach tan drained out of him. He was moonlight and shadow.
"Kurama...?" he whispered.
"You're safe," Kurama said in relief. "Stay here." He laid Shuuichi back onto the ground. Kitten-weak, the black-haired human looked confusedly at Botan, his voice questioning her name next. Kurama stood and prowled over to the onmyouji.
"Why?" he spat, ripping the leaf that covered the man's mouth.
"Abomination," the man spat back. "Using that boy for your own foul purposes--"
"Monster?" Kurama questioned, voice restrained from the true rage he felt. "Demon? I assure you, I've heard them all before. Tell me, if the Sumeragi himself refused to exorcise me and risk the life of Minamino Shuuichi, who are you to try to kill him?" Gold eyes glittered in the darkness.
The man gaped like a breathless fish.
"For Subaru's sake, I'll spare you. He doesn't like his people being killed. Be assured, though, that he will know about you. And he's much less... gentle... these days than he used to be."
A bamboo leaf, its edge razor-sharp, was a blade in Kurama's hand. He held it to the man's neck, pressing until blood flowed. He dipped a finger in that red liquid, drew a quick character on the onmyouji's neck, and said a very old word. The mark glowed briefly. "If you transgress again," he murmured, "know that the beloved of Inari take great pride in vengeance."
~*~
If Kurama had a hobby, Hiei thought irritably, it was making his life difficult. At the moment he was stuck baby-sitting Minamino Shuuichi while Yuusuke and The Fool went out into the forest that bordered this town, trying to find wherever it was that Kurama had hidden himself. Worse yet, this nursemaid request had come from Koenma and Hiei was still on probation with the Reikai so he couldn't just ignore it. Thus he was wasting a perfectly good night just sitting in a tree outside a human hospital, keeping an eye on a powerless human.
Who finally sighed, closed the book he'd been reading, stood up, and walked to the window of his room, opening it. "Hiei," he called, "I know you're there. Come inside if you want." Then he went back to the bed and curled his legs beneath himself while he waited.
Hiei disliked being summoned, but--
It must have seemed to the human that he appeared inside the room out of nowhere, but Shuuichi only smiled at him as though he'd been anticipated.
"How did you know I was there?" Hiei asked. No one should have been able to sense him, not even Kurama, who this human decidedly was not.
"Who else would Koenma have set to watch me?" the human asked with a casual shrug. "I thought you must be bored. I'll read to you if you like."
"I can read for myself." Kurama had taught him how to read Japanese years before.
"Yes, I know, but will you?"
Shuuichi had him there. "No," Hiei admitted.
The human smiled. "Sit, then, and you can listen."
Hiei grudgingly perched on the open windowsill, thinking anything had to be better than doing guard duty alone.
~*~
Kurama neither raised a paw nor opened an eye as his friends came arrow-straight towards his new den, Kuwabara leading Yuusuke with his unerring psychic sense. Instead the thorny rose vines that barred entrance to the small cave stirred, thickened with a whisper. The pair of them stopped a short distance away from that barrier. Kurama pondered how he could send a more clear message of "go away," but gave up on dissuading them when Yuusuke flopped into a cross-legged position on the ground. If Yuusuke was one thing, it was stubborn. If it took him an eternity, he still wouldn't leave until he'd convinced Kurama to come out and go back with them.
All of which did not mean that Kurama intended to make it easy for him. So he waited and listened.
~*~
"Kuwabara-kun would be a Hufflepuff, I think," Shuuichi mused. "Yuusuke, though, screams Gryffindor."
"You'd be a Ravenclaw," Hiei opined from where he was still perched on the windowsill. It was starting to become light outside, but he hadn't moved all night. Shuuichi had actually seen him start relaxing into the story halfway through the book and had hidden a small smile, continuing to read. He suspected he was starting to get Hiei to like him as a separate individual from Kurama.
"You want people to think you're a Slytherin, but you're more like a Gryffindor too," Shuuichi retorted.
"What about Kurama?"
The question hung in the air between the two of them for a moment.
"I think," Shuuichi slowly answered, "that he'd be a Slytherin... he looks for what's of the best advantage to him. He's ruthless. But he's not evil. I know there are a few people he'd do anything for."
"Yuusuke."
"You, too," Shuuichi said, drawing Hiei's eyes to himself. He smirked, knowing things the Jaganshi didn't. "He'd do about anything for you and Kuwabara-kun."
"What would I do for you?" a deep voice suddenly asked. Shuuichi jumped and Hiei half-uncurled from his position, hand on sword. Kurama, tall and silver, melted out of the shadows in the corner of the hospital room. Hiei relaxed. Shuuichi, though, found that he couldn't keep his eyes off of the fox spirit who for so long had been his other half.
"Kurama," he greeted finally as the youko perched on the foot of his bed, fluffy tail twitching about to curl around his waist and onto Kurama's lap.
"Shuuichi." Kurama reached across the distance between them and threaded his fingers through dark bangs to touch Shuuichi's forehead. It was only a moment of touch, then he drew back again. "You seem better."
"No thanks to three days of hospital food. I'd give anything for a good bowl of ramen."
Kurama grinned, showing far too many teeth. "Hit Yuusuke up when you get out. He said he'd give you some free."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-07-19 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-19 11:48 am (UTC)/echoes what SailorMac said.