Yet more still nameless fic
Sep. 22nd, 2006 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76 Stepping quietly, his power cloaked, Subaru walked up on the silver-haired doll from behind. He fanned a few ofuda in his right hand in case stealth failed him, and contemplated his options. The silver thread that led from Suigintou’s ring stretched away into the far side of the church, where a murderer waited, feeding her power. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t understand her actions, either. He’d known that same pain of loss, that self-consuming black wave of hatred, the desire to lash out, to make someone else hurt instead....
But in himself, it had ebbed into despair instead, love and guilt and betray pooling into a final suicidal wish, nothing more and nothing less than to be killed by his love, his sister’s murderer, to be in whatever twisted way by that man’s side forever.
Seishirou had taken that option away from him. And he would take that option away from this doll before it could be fully realized.
Quickly and quietly, he cast his ofuda on the air, five in the first ring, five in the second, two overlapping stars, a jade pentagram and an amber pentacle encircling Suigintou, cutting off her attack. Her feathers crumpled to soot in her fingers as she cast them forth, and she furiously grabbed for more power, only to find the result the same.
“You can’t hurt them,” Subaru said even as she shrieked wordlessly and turned to dive at him, fury writ large across her face. The encircling spells moved with her as he stepped aside, evading. They would not prevent a physical attack, only a magical one.
“I can still hurt you,” she vowed, and a black sword burned into existence within her grasp. “You’ll do almost as well.”
“You can try,” Subaru said evenly, unimpressed, “but as long as you let your pain rule you, you will fail.”
“We’ll see,” she hissed, and dove at him.
*
“Who is he?” Shinku murmured, one hand on the altar as she watched her sister redirect her fury onto a new target.
“I think,” Jun said from next to her, adjusting his glasses, “that he’s Tachibana-san’s teacher.”
*
Hisoka’s steps led them surely into darkness. Asato followed, one hand in Byakko’s thick fur. He could feel the tension in Byakko’s muscles. The shinigami hated Muraki nearly as much as Hisoka did. It surprised Asato a bit when he wondered what he felt about Muraki. There should have been fear, or hate, or at the very least disdain, but there wasn’t. There was very little other than a faint trace of sorrow and pity for a life so wasted, twisted into darkness and murder and regret.
He felt a little hollow without his usual emotions sustaining him. Or empty, like this church, like a great silent cathedral bathed in light, space waiting to be filled, a phoenix’s egg waiting to hatch. He wondered what had changed.
“Tsuzuki,” Byakko asked, “should you call Suzaku?”
“No,” Asato replied softly, thinking of the warrior shinigami, of her grace and skill on the battlefield, and her girlish crush on him, “not yet. Not until we know there’s need.”
A rumble of acquiescence passed beneath his fingers, and the chapel was far larger within than it seemed without, for he and Hisoka and Byakko passed now out of the darkness into an arena of light where Muraki waited, smiling, perched on the altar, the room bathed in white and dying blood. Behind and above him, the bloody sunset stained red the glass window depicting angels falling from Heaven. Asato wondered momentarily if Muraki meant himself to be Lucifer.
Byakko growled from where he stood between Asato and Hisoka, and barely restrained himself from leaping at the altar to tear out the doctor’s throat. Asato’s fingers twisted deeper into his fur.
Where was the pain, the anger...? Where had they gone?
“Welcome, Tsuzuki-san,” Muraki said pleasantly, smiling.
*
Sakon’s feet kept pounding on the pavement as he tried to find the inner sense of Subaru’s magic and use it to track his teacher’s location. It was a lot harder while running than it was during the quiet night. Ukon helped, a solid base of concern and comparison.
“Sakon!” His aunt waved at him from across the street. “Over here!”
His feet carried them across the way. “Kaoruko-neesan?”
“Azuki called and said you might need a ride,” she explained. “Something about a possessed doll that wasn’t Ukon and you running off?”
Sakon slid in the passenger seat. “One of the samurai puppets said Sumeragi-sensei needed us.”
“Subaru?” Her mouth compressed into a line and her foot came down on the gas. “Right, where to?”
Sakon closed his eyes and sank into his power. The sense of Subaru stretched away “South,” he said, opening his eyes. Kaoruko wove in and out of the traffic.
“An address would be nice,” his aunt grated.
“Magic isn’t like a GPS,” Ukon told her.
“Well, it shouldn’t be like a game of hot and cold either!” she retorted. “Why does he need you two specifically anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Sakon said quietly. He and Ukon looked at one another, both now considering the question. What could they possibly do that Subaru couldn’t?
*
Subaru ducked and wove seamlessly, evading the angry attacks. She wouldn’t trust him, and was ignoring the pleas of her sister doll to stop, to reconsider, to change her course of events, her mind, her self.
“You know he killed her,” he said quietly. “Muraki Kazutaka, the last doctor to have attended that girl... he let her go into the night to ease her pain. He fulfilled his Hippocratic oath in that way.”
“You lie,” she spat, and her sword skimmed by his cheek.
“Ask him, then,” Subaru said. “You’re bonded, shouldn’t you be able to tell if he lies?” She didn’t answer. “Or do you just not want to know?”
“If he killed her, it was because she asked. He did what I couldn’t,” Suigintou spat, positioning herself for another attack. Her swordwork, Subaru mused, was actually quite good. His sensei would have approved.
“And if he took the energy of her pain and of her death and used it for his own purposes?” he questioned. “Does that still make his purpose so noble? Is he still so righteous?” His gaze bore into hers. “Is the power he’s feeding you her pain?”
Suigintou faltered, as he’d thought she might.
“Suigintou, stop,” her golden-haired sister pleaded again, standing on top of the altar. A stream of red rose petals flew from her open hand to surround Subaru’s spell, another layer of entrapment. “He hasn’t harmed you. You don’t need to hurt him.”
Suigintou’s pale eyes didn’t look away from Subaru’s. “This power?” she whispered, questioning.
He nodded. “It’s blood magic,” he confirmed. It was a taste he knew well in the ebb and flow of power. “Hers, or someone else’s.”
The doll’s expression crumpled. “No,” she whispered in horror, sinking to the ground. She looked up at him again. “It can’t be,” she pleaded.
“I’m sorry,” Subaru said.
“Suigintou,” the other doll said quietly, dropping to the ground and walking over to her sister. She extended a hand. “Come home with us.”
“Shinku,” Suigintou said helplessly, tears in her eyes. “I....” She looked at the extended hand, then reached out her own to accept it.
And crumpled to the ground before touching, a scream of pain tearing free from her throat.
“Suigintou!” the doll and the boy who had accompanied her cried as one.
*
Muraki sat calmly cross-legged on the altar, his hand on the head of the dark-haired doll he held on his lap, stroking gently. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked calmly, still smiling. Hisoka felt the curse marks flare through his skin, their heat thick and sluggish as they writhed. There was something wrong here. Muraki was acting like he had the upper hand when they were the ones who had him cornered. What did he know that they didn’t?
“This time you lose,” Tsuzuki said, taking a step forward. “It’s time to go to you judgment, Muraki.”
Muraki’s smile widened. “Really?” he asked ingeniously, tilting his head to one side. “I think you underestimate me, Tsuzuki-san.”
And the doll’s eyes opened.
Hisoka felt comprehension drop cold and hard into the pit of his stomach. The doll’s eyes....
“I think it’s rather a good replica, don’t you, Tsuzuki-san?” Muraki asked. “It wasn’t easy to match your hair color, and the eyes... almost impossible to find the right shade of purple. But one does one’s best.”
Numbly, Hisoka looked down at the floor beneath their feet, feeling as much as seeing the flickering silver lines of the inscribed spell. On the other side of Byakko, Tsuzuki slumped to his knees. “Muraki, you..." he said weakly, like a man gasping for air.
Hisoka swallowed. And took charge. “Byakko, get him out of here!” he snapped. The shikigami tiger immediately ducked his neck under Tsuzuki’s limp body, wrangling the shinigami onto his back, and leapt back the way they’d came.
Only to be stopped by a crackling net of white lightning. Hisoka smelled singed fur as Byakko recovered and stood, turned, snarled.
The doll looked more alive by the second.
“If I can’t have Tsuzuki-san in one piece,” Muraki said, looking fondly down at the porcelain doll he held, “I don’t mind two. Of course, I suppose you’d be in such a bother about not being with him, wouldn’t you, boy?”
“Muraki...” Hisoka grated.
“Be happy,” the white doctor chided. “For once I’m thinking of both of you.” He reached behind himself and pulled out another doll. Hisoka’s breath died as he realized it had his same hair color. But its eyes were still closed.
“You won’t get away with this,” he warned.
“But I already have,” Muraki confided. “You don’t have your shadow master friend to save you this time, and the onmyouji in the other room is quite tied up at current. And Tsuzuki-san’s shinigami is useless without him.”
Anger burned through Hisoka, and he was quite sure it was his own. “You /won’t/ get away with this,” he vowed, and took a step forward.
Muraki laughed and stroked the dark blond hair of the second doll.
*
A network of fine cracks spread across Suigintou’s skin as Jun watched, horrified. She clung to Shinku, fear on her face and in her voice as she gasped the other Rozen Maiden’s name over and over again. Shinku held her back, anguish on her face and in the lines of her body.
“What’s happening to her?” Jun asked the onmyouji, helpless to do anything but watch.
The onmyouji knelt on Suigintou’s other side. “He’s stealing her life force,” he said quietly. “The spell that makes her animate—he’s siphoning it away to someplace else.”
“Can’t you stop it?” Shinku demanded.
The onmyouji shook his head, sadness in his mismatched eyes. “Not when she’s willingly made a bond with him. In some things, intent is all that matters.”
Suigintou was dying all over again. Jun watched as Shinku bowed her head, her fingers clenching in the sleeves of her sister’s jacket. A crystalline tear ran down her cheek.
“What if she had another power source?” Jun asked quietly. He’d done it before, been medium for both Shinku and Suiseiseki for a time.
“He’d drain you through her,” the onmyouji answered steadily. “Eventually you’d die too.”
“But it would buy her more time, right?”
The onmyouji regarded him, then nodded once.
Shinku looked at Jun with wide eyes. “Jun....”
He smiled at her. “It’ll be all right.” And took Suigintou’s delicate hand in his, age-darkening spreading through the cracks already like liver spots on a human being, and pressed his lips to her fingers, willing with his heart that she live just another day—another hour—another minute....
And the bond was set.
*
Asato was split in two, part of him lying on the cold stone floor, being guarded by Byakko, watching helplessly as his partner stepped forward across the shifting, flaring lines of the spell carved into the marble, crying out voicelessly “Hisoka!” and wanting nothing more than to save his partner, but he had no voice, no connection to his useless body to move it.... And part of himself watched Hisoka come toward him from where he sat, similarly imprisoned in a body he could not move, a doll on Muraki’s lap.
The tears of anger and frustration and fear could not come. He could only watch his partner move toward both of their dooms, no other options for either of them.
*
The doll and the boy and the other doll curled together against the altar in the room behind Subaru. If he and Tsuzuki and Kurosaki couldn’t undo Muraki’s magic, all three of them might die, just a few more deaths on Muraki’s account, but three more that would weigh Subaru’s soul down like stones in the darkness of the night and in the judgment hereafter. /These deaths that I could not prevent..../
Before him there was a barrier of magic, and on its other side a battlefield. Subaru paused, to study briefly what he saw, and fit it to the wasting death Suigintou was being put through.
The dolls on Muraki’s lap tied it all together, and Subaru grew suddenly angry. Soul theft was unforgivable even for the darkest of magicians.
He brought his hands before him and closed his eyes, feeling in the darkness for the balance he needed. Alone, his hands began to fly from position to position, a whispered stream of enchantment spilling from his lips to bring down the barrier.
*
Hisoka moved forward, step after step bringing him though protective spells that flared around him, trying to strip flesh from bone, magic from soul, power from being. He ignored them and kept moving through heavy air, like a pearl falling through poisoned honey.
Muraki’s eyes were wide. “I’m impressed, boy. You’ve gotten better.”
The talisman in Hisoka’s pocket was all that kept him from a true death at the hands of the spells Muraki had lain down, but he wasn’t about to let the man know that. If it had been crafted to shield him from the power of the Sakurazukamori’s cursed tree, Hisoka hoped, then it would surely withstand the spells that Muraki had prepared.
He didn’t know what he would do once he reached Muraki, though. He wished for the weight of a katana in his hand. Even a bokken would do. He didn’t have the raw power Tsuzuki did, and never had. He was an empath, not a magician. But he had to do something. Byakko couldn’t. Tsuzuki was out for the count. It was Hisoka alone.
He doubted he was a physical match for Muraki. Even if there hadn’t been that part of him that was still a thirteen-year-old boy, pinned and raped in the moonlight, Muraki was whipcord muscle and knowledge pressure points. Older body or not, Muraki still had the advantage of him.
“I would rather see Tsuzuki dead than in your hands,” Hisoka growled, the glimmerings of an idea coming to him. If the doll was broken.... “I would rather be dead with him.”
“That’s where we differ,” Muraki said calmly, less than five feet away and still showing no signs of moving. “I don’t care to die with my lover.”
“He is /not/ my lover,” Hisoka grated. No matter how much, sometimes, Hisoka wondered what it might be like, he and Tsuzuki /weren’t./
“Oh, really?” Muraki asked, still smiling. “A pity. I’ve had both of you, you know, and Tsuzuki-san really is incomparable.”
He knew Muraki was baiting him. That didn’t stop hatred from flaring through Hisoka as he struggled through the last spell. He wanted to kill Muraki, no matter how helpless he was to do so.
Helpless?
/Tsuzuki?/
*
“Turn right,” Sakon said, eyes closed as he followed the subtle flaring of the Sumeragi’s magic.
“A church?” Ukon asked him.
“A chapel,” Sakon corrected. “It’s dilapidated….”
“What is there in this area that’s like that?” Kaoruko demanded. “Are you sure you’re getting the right place.”
“Yes. Stop,” Sakon said, and opened his eyes.
They were in front of a hospital. His eyes scanned across the front of the building and away to the left, and there, around the side of the main building, half-hidden, was a small white church. “There it is.”
“Stay here and out of trouble,” Ukon advised as he and Sakon left the car.
“What?!” Kaoruko demanded as they ran across the lawn. Behind them, Sakon heard her grumble to herself about being treated like a dog as she moved the car to park.
“You really shouldn’t tease her like that,” he chided Ukon.
“But it’s so easy,” his partner replied.
Sakon sighed. “And you wonder why she hits you,” he commented.
*
The barrier fell, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whining hum like a high-powered electric fence shut off and left to cool, its wires protesting the sudden lack of current.
Subaru stepped through, past the whimpering remnants of the spell, and knelt briefly next to Byakko and Tsuzuki, checking on the condition of the latter. His flesh was cool and his pulse nearly gone. “He’s almost completely transferred,” Subaru murmured. He looked into intelligent spirit tiger eyes. “Taking him away from here won’t do any good now. Will you guard him?”
The tiger nodded. “With my life and my honor,” he replied. “Good hunting to you.”
Leaving the shikigami to guard his master, Subaru stepped forward, weaving easily through the spells that had slowed Kurosaki. Once you knew the trick of it, it wasn’t that difficult. The Sakurazukamori cloaked himself in spells, sent out illusions of misdirection, was as untouchable as mist and as invisible as that which it disguised. It was a dance of adrenaline, a magical challenge, a lover’s touch, a thrill to pursue, /Catch me not but let me catch you..../
But this wasn’t a capture he would make unless there was no choice. No, for the weight of suffering they’d suffered at the man’s hands, that right belonged to Tsuzuki and Kurosaki. They were the ones with the need for closure. Subaru respected that need.
Muraki didn’t miss his approach the way many would have, which re-edged Subaru’s awareness of how dangerous the man was. “You’re not just an average onmyouji,” the sorcerer declared. “Such good eyes you have, both you and the boy.”
“Return Tsuzuki-san and face Enma-sama’s judgment,” Subaru requested mildly, not expecting an affirmative answer. But the request had to be made anyway, for the sake of civility.
Muraki seemed puzzled. “Whyever should I want to do that?”
“He’s not yours,” Kurosaki spat out. Subaru’s hand on his shoulder restrained him, but only for the moment.
“At the moment, he’s not yours either,” Muraki pointed out, and vanished.
Or tried to.
Subaru smiled back at the astonished doctor. “If you won’t come with us easily,” he said, letting the hardness of his heart show in mismatched eyes, “I have no problem with delivering you to Enma Daiou’s doorstep with my hand through your heart.”
Muraki’s eyes widened. “Sakurazukamori.”
Subaru nodded.
Muraki’s eyes narrowed. He raised one hand, the Tsuzuki doll in it, and dashed the porcelain figure to the ground.
“No!” Hisoka screamed.
But in himself, it had ebbed into despair instead, love and guilt and betray pooling into a final suicidal wish, nothing more and nothing less than to be killed by his love, his sister’s murderer, to be in whatever twisted way by that man’s side forever.
Seishirou had taken that option away from him. And he would take that option away from this doll before it could be fully realized.
Quickly and quietly, he cast his ofuda on the air, five in the first ring, five in the second, two overlapping stars, a jade pentagram and an amber pentacle encircling Suigintou, cutting off her attack. Her feathers crumpled to soot in her fingers as she cast them forth, and she furiously grabbed for more power, only to find the result the same.
“You can’t hurt them,” Subaru said even as she shrieked wordlessly and turned to dive at him, fury writ large across her face. The encircling spells moved with her as he stepped aside, evading. They would not prevent a physical attack, only a magical one.
“I can still hurt you,” she vowed, and a black sword burned into existence within her grasp. “You’ll do almost as well.”
“You can try,” Subaru said evenly, unimpressed, “but as long as you let your pain rule you, you will fail.”
“We’ll see,” she hissed, and dove at him.
“Who is he?” Shinku murmured, one hand on the altar as she watched her sister redirect her fury onto a new target.
“I think,” Jun said from next to her, adjusting his glasses, “that he’s Tachibana-san’s teacher.”
Hisoka’s steps led them surely into darkness. Asato followed, one hand in Byakko’s thick fur. He could feel the tension in Byakko’s muscles. The shinigami hated Muraki nearly as much as Hisoka did. It surprised Asato a bit when he wondered what he felt about Muraki. There should have been fear, or hate, or at the very least disdain, but there wasn’t. There was very little other than a faint trace of sorrow and pity for a life so wasted, twisted into darkness and murder and regret.
He felt a little hollow without his usual emotions sustaining him. Or empty, like this church, like a great silent cathedral bathed in light, space waiting to be filled, a phoenix’s egg waiting to hatch. He wondered what had changed.
“Tsuzuki,” Byakko asked, “should you call Suzaku?”
“No,” Asato replied softly, thinking of the warrior shinigami, of her grace and skill on the battlefield, and her girlish crush on him, “not yet. Not until we know there’s need.”
A rumble of acquiescence passed beneath his fingers, and the chapel was far larger within than it seemed without, for he and Hisoka and Byakko passed now out of the darkness into an arena of light where Muraki waited, smiling, perched on the altar, the room bathed in white and dying blood. Behind and above him, the bloody sunset stained red the glass window depicting angels falling from Heaven. Asato wondered momentarily if Muraki meant himself to be Lucifer.
Byakko growled from where he stood between Asato and Hisoka, and barely restrained himself from leaping at the altar to tear out the doctor’s throat. Asato’s fingers twisted deeper into his fur.
Where was the pain, the anger...? Where had they gone?
“Welcome, Tsuzuki-san,” Muraki said pleasantly, smiling.
Sakon’s feet kept pounding on the pavement as he tried to find the inner sense of Subaru’s magic and use it to track his teacher’s location. It was a lot harder while running than it was during the quiet night. Ukon helped, a solid base of concern and comparison.
“Sakon!” His aunt waved at him from across the street. “Over here!”
His feet carried them across the way. “Kaoruko-neesan?”
“Azuki called and said you might need a ride,” she explained. “Something about a possessed doll that wasn’t Ukon and you running off?”
Sakon slid in the passenger seat. “One of the samurai puppets said Sumeragi-sensei needed us.”
“Subaru?” Her mouth compressed into a line and her foot came down on the gas. “Right, where to?”
Sakon closed his eyes and sank into his power. The sense of Subaru stretched away “South,” he said, opening his eyes. Kaoruko wove in and out of the traffic.
“An address would be nice,” his aunt grated.
“Magic isn’t like a GPS,” Ukon told her.
“Well, it shouldn’t be like a game of hot and cold either!” she retorted. “Why does he need you two specifically anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Sakon said quietly. He and Ukon looked at one another, both now considering the question. What could they possibly do that Subaru couldn’t?
Subaru ducked and wove seamlessly, evading the angry attacks. She wouldn’t trust him, and was ignoring the pleas of her sister doll to stop, to reconsider, to change her course of events, her mind, her self.
“You know he killed her,” he said quietly. “Muraki Kazutaka, the last doctor to have attended that girl... he let her go into the night to ease her pain. He fulfilled his Hippocratic oath in that way.”
“You lie,” she spat, and her sword skimmed by his cheek.
“Ask him, then,” Subaru said. “You’re bonded, shouldn’t you be able to tell if he lies?” She didn’t answer. “Or do you just not want to know?”
“If he killed her, it was because she asked. He did what I couldn’t,” Suigintou spat, positioning herself for another attack. Her swordwork, Subaru mused, was actually quite good. His sensei would have approved.
“And if he took the energy of her pain and of her death and used it for his own purposes?” he questioned. “Does that still make his purpose so noble? Is he still so righteous?” His gaze bore into hers. “Is the power he’s feeding you her pain?”
Suigintou faltered, as he’d thought she might.
“Suigintou, stop,” her golden-haired sister pleaded again, standing on top of the altar. A stream of red rose petals flew from her open hand to surround Subaru’s spell, another layer of entrapment. “He hasn’t harmed you. You don’t need to hurt him.”
Suigintou’s pale eyes didn’t look away from Subaru’s. “This power?” she whispered, questioning.
He nodded. “It’s blood magic,” he confirmed. It was a taste he knew well in the ebb and flow of power. “Hers, or someone else’s.”
The doll’s expression crumpled. “No,” she whispered in horror, sinking to the ground. She looked up at him again. “It can’t be,” she pleaded.
“I’m sorry,” Subaru said.
“Suigintou,” the other doll said quietly, dropping to the ground and walking over to her sister. She extended a hand. “Come home with us.”
“Shinku,” Suigintou said helplessly, tears in her eyes. “I....” She looked at the extended hand, then reached out her own to accept it.
And crumpled to the ground before touching, a scream of pain tearing free from her throat.
“Suigintou!” the doll and the boy who had accompanied her cried as one.
Muraki sat calmly cross-legged on the altar, his hand on the head of the dark-haired doll he held on his lap, stroking gently. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked calmly, still smiling. Hisoka felt the curse marks flare through his skin, their heat thick and sluggish as they writhed. There was something wrong here. Muraki was acting like he had the upper hand when they were the ones who had him cornered. What did he know that they didn’t?
“This time you lose,” Tsuzuki said, taking a step forward. “It’s time to go to you judgment, Muraki.”
Muraki’s smile widened. “Really?” he asked ingeniously, tilting his head to one side. “I think you underestimate me, Tsuzuki-san.”
And the doll’s eyes opened.
Hisoka felt comprehension drop cold and hard into the pit of his stomach. The doll’s eyes....
“I think it’s rather a good replica, don’t you, Tsuzuki-san?” Muraki asked. “It wasn’t easy to match your hair color, and the eyes... almost impossible to find the right shade of purple. But one does one’s best.”
Numbly, Hisoka looked down at the floor beneath their feet, feeling as much as seeing the flickering silver lines of the inscribed spell. On the other side of Byakko, Tsuzuki slumped to his knees. “Muraki, you..." he said weakly, like a man gasping for air.
Hisoka swallowed. And took charge. “Byakko, get him out of here!” he snapped. The shikigami tiger immediately ducked his neck under Tsuzuki’s limp body, wrangling the shinigami onto his back, and leapt back the way they’d came.
Only to be stopped by a crackling net of white lightning. Hisoka smelled singed fur as Byakko recovered and stood, turned, snarled.
The doll looked more alive by the second.
“If I can’t have Tsuzuki-san in one piece,” Muraki said, looking fondly down at the porcelain doll he held, “I don’t mind two. Of course, I suppose you’d be in such a bother about not being with him, wouldn’t you, boy?”
“Muraki...” Hisoka grated.
“Be happy,” the white doctor chided. “For once I’m thinking of both of you.” He reached behind himself and pulled out another doll. Hisoka’s breath died as he realized it had his same hair color. But its eyes were still closed.
“You won’t get away with this,” he warned.
“But I already have,” Muraki confided. “You don’t have your shadow master friend to save you this time, and the onmyouji in the other room is quite tied up at current. And Tsuzuki-san’s shinigami is useless without him.”
Anger burned through Hisoka, and he was quite sure it was his own. “You /won’t/ get away with this,” he vowed, and took a step forward.
Muraki laughed and stroked the dark blond hair of the second doll.
A network of fine cracks spread across Suigintou’s skin as Jun watched, horrified. She clung to Shinku, fear on her face and in her voice as she gasped the other Rozen Maiden’s name over and over again. Shinku held her back, anguish on her face and in the lines of her body.
“What’s happening to her?” Jun asked the onmyouji, helpless to do anything but watch.
The onmyouji knelt on Suigintou’s other side. “He’s stealing her life force,” he said quietly. “The spell that makes her animate—he’s siphoning it away to someplace else.”
“Can’t you stop it?” Shinku demanded.
The onmyouji shook his head, sadness in his mismatched eyes. “Not when she’s willingly made a bond with him. In some things, intent is all that matters.”
Suigintou was dying all over again. Jun watched as Shinku bowed her head, her fingers clenching in the sleeves of her sister’s jacket. A crystalline tear ran down her cheek.
“What if she had another power source?” Jun asked quietly. He’d done it before, been medium for both Shinku and Suiseiseki for a time.
“He’d drain you through her,” the onmyouji answered steadily. “Eventually you’d die too.”
“But it would buy her more time, right?”
The onmyouji regarded him, then nodded once.
Shinku looked at Jun with wide eyes. “Jun....”
He smiled at her. “It’ll be all right.” And took Suigintou’s delicate hand in his, age-darkening spreading through the cracks already like liver spots on a human being, and pressed his lips to her fingers, willing with his heart that she live just another day—another hour—another minute....
And the bond was set.
Asato was split in two, part of him lying on the cold stone floor, being guarded by Byakko, watching helplessly as his partner stepped forward across the shifting, flaring lines of the spell carved into the marble, crying out voicelessly “Hisoka!” and wanting nothing more than to save his partner, but he had no voice, no connection to his useless body to move it.... And part of himself watched Hisoka come toward him from where he sat, similarly imprisoned in a body he could not move, a doll on Muraki’s lap.
The tears of anger and frustration and fear could not come. He could only watch his partner move toward both of their dooms, no other options for either of them.
The doll and the boy and the other doll curled together against the altar in the room behind Subaru. If he and Tsuzuki and Kurosaki couldn’t undo Muraki’s magic, all three of them might die, just a few more deaths on Muraki’s account, but three more that would weigh Subaru’s soul down like stones in the darkness of the night and in the judgment hereafter. /These deaths that I could not prevent..../
Before him there was a barrier of magic, and on its other side a battlefield. Subaru paused, to study briefly what he saw, and fit it to the wasting death Suigintou was being put through.
The dolls on Muraki’s lap tied it all together, and Subaru grew suddenly angry. Soul theft was unforgivable even for the darkest of magicians.
He brought his hands before him and closed his eyes, feeling in the darkness for the balance he needed. Alone, his hands began to fly from position to position, a whispered stream of enchantment spilling from his lips to bring down the barrier.
Hisoka moved forward, step after step bringing him though protective spells that flared around him, trying to strip flesh from bone, magic from soul, power from being. He ignored them and kept moving through heavy air, like a pearl falling through poisoned honey.
Muraki’s eyes were wide. “I’m impressed, boy. You’ve gotten better.”
The talisman in Hisoka’s pocket was all that kept him from a true death at the hands of the spells Muraki had lain down, but he wasn’t about to let the man know that. If it had been crafted to shield him from the power of the Sakurazukamori’s cursed tree, Hisoka hoped, then it would surely withstand the spells that Muraki had prepared.
He didn’t know what he would do once he reached Muraki, though. He wished for the weight of a katana in his hand. Even a bokken would do. He didn’t have the raw power Tsuzuki did, and never had. He was an empath, not a magician. But he had to do something. Byakko couldn’t. Tsuzuki was out for the count. It was Hisoka alone.
He doubted he was a physical match for Muraki. Even if there hadn’t been that part of him that was still a thirteen-year-old boy, pinned and raped in the moonlight, Muraki was whipcord muscle and knowledge pressure points. Older body or not, Muraki still had the advantage of him.
“I would rather see Tsuzuki dead than in your hands,” Hisoka growled, the glimmerings of an idea coming to him. If the doll was broken.... “I would rather be dead with him.”
“That’s where we differ,” Muraki said calmly, less than five feet away and still showing no signs of moving. “I don’t care to die with my lover.”
“He is /not/ my lover,” Hisoka grated. No matter how much, sometimes, Hisoka wondered what it might be like, he and Tsuzuki /weren’t./
“Oh, really?” Muraki asked, still smiling. “A pity. I’ve had both of you, you know, and Tsuzuki-san really is incomparable.”
He knew Muraki was baiting him. That didn’t stop hatred from flaring through Hisoka as he struggled through the last spell. He wanted to kill Muraki, no matter how helpless he was to do so.
Helpless?
/Tsuzuki?/
“Turn right,” Sakon said, eyes closed as he followed the subtle flaring of the Sumeragi’s magic.
“A church?” Ukon asked him.
“A chapel,” Sakon corrected. “It’s dilapidated….”
“What is there in this area that’s like that?” Kaoruko demanded. “Are you sure you’re getting the right place.”
“Yes. Stop,” Sakon said, and opened his eyes.
They were in front of a hospital. His eyes scanned across the front of the building and away to the left, and there, around the side of the main building, half-hidden, was a small white church. “There it is.”
“Stay here and out of trouble,” Ukon advised as he and Sakon left the car.
“What?!” Kaoruko demanded as they ran across the lawn. Behind them, Sakon heard her grumble to herself about being treated like a dog as she moved the car to park.
“You really shouldn’t tease her like that,” he chided Ukon.
“But it’s so easy,” his partner replied.
Sakon sighed. “And you wonder why she hits you,” he commented.
The barrier fell, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whining hum like a high-powered electric fence shut off and left to cool, its wires protesting the sudden lack of current.
Subaru stepped through, past the whimpering remnants of the spell, and knelt briefly next to Byakko and Tsuzuki, checking on the condition of the latter. His flesh was cool and his pulse nearly gone. “He’s almost completely transferred,” Subaru murmured. He looked into intelligent spirit tiger eyes. “Taking him away from here won’t do any good now. Will you guard him?”
The tiger nodded. “With my life and my honor,” he replied. “Good hunting to you.”
Leaving the shikigami to guard his master, Subaru stepped forward, weaving easily through the spells that had slowed Kurosaki. Once you knew the trick of it, it wasn’t that difficult. The Sakurazukamori cloaked himself in spells, sent out illusions of misdirection, was as untouchable as mist and as invisible as that which it disguised. It was a dance of adrenaline, a magical challenge, a lover’s touch, a thrill to pursue, /Catch me not but let me catch you..../
But this wasn’t a capture he would make unless there was no choice. No, for the weight of suffering they’d suffered at the man’s hands, that right belonged to Tsuzuki and Kurosaki. They were the ones with the need for closure. Subaru respected that need.
Muraki didn’t miss his approach the way many would have, which re-edged Subaru’s awareness of how dangerous the man was. “You’re not just an average onmyouji,” the sorcerer declared. “Such good eyes you have, both you and the boy.”
“Return Tsuzuki-san and face Enma-sama’s judgment,” Subaru requested mildly, not expecting an affirmative answer. But the request had to be made anyway, for the sake of civility.
Muraki seemed puzzled. “Whyever should I want to do that?”
“He’s not yours,” Kurosaki spat out. Subaru’s hand on his shoulder restrained him, but only for the moment.
“At the moment, he’s not yours either,” Muraki pointed out, and vanished.
Or tried to.
Subaru smiled back at the astonished doctor. “If you won’t come with us easily,” he said, letting the hardness of his heart show in mismatched eyes, “I have no problem with delivering you to Enma Daiou’s doorstep with my hand through your heart.”
Muraki’s eyes widened. “Sakurazukamori.”
Subaru nodded.
Muraki’s eyes narrowed. He raised one hand, the Tsuzuki doll in it, and dashed the porcelain figure to the ground.
“No!” Hisoka screamed.
