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-:][ Past Crimes ][:- (The HxM Fanfic) ({Ch.1 - 5}) |
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Prologue ==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==#==
The clipped tattoo of panicked footsteps echoed off the dark red walls of brick, rising up on either side of the narrow alley like solid foreboding monoliths in the few weak streetlights. It was absolutely musical to hear.
It had been so long since he had stalked in someone’s shadow, catching glimpse after glimpse of their growing fear, listening to their frantic breathing, watching the helpless terror overcome their body slowly, stiffening their stride as rationality fought against the paranoia instilled behind their darting eyes. He had almost forgotten how much dark pleasure it gave him.
He hadn’t been so amused by anything in months, and now this perfect chance had presented itself.
From where he lingered, just close enough to let his presence raise the hair on the back of her neck with chills, he could see the trembling of her fists under the streetlight as she clenched the handles of two plastic bags full of groceries. He chuckled softly somewhere behind her;
‘Poor little mouse...’
Her mouth twisted in an ugly grimace of fear as she whirled around, her bags swinging around with her, banging into the sides of her jelly-weak legs as she stared into nothing but the darkness of the alley beyond the harsh circle of orange light, stretching out behind her like a dim tunnel. A tiny dry sob escaped her at the sound of slow, menacing footsteps, gradually echoing louder from every angle.
He watched her turn around and around under the dirty light, clutching the handles of the cumbersome plastic bags to her chest so that they banged into her elbows, as if they would save her. It was all too entertaining, approaching effortlessly from behind, as her whitened face, frozen in a mask of panic, glanced left and right for the one who stalked her.
As if sensing him, she stood still, staring ahead as she breathed in little trembling gasps. Inches behind her, he leaned over her small shoulder, easily a foot taller than his victim, and paused as if drinking in her fear, then he filled her ear with the sweetest murmur that a man standing directly beside them would not have heard:
‘I want what you stole from me...’
He saw her freeze, still as a stone, the terror shining in her eyes.
‘There is nowhere you can escape me; I know everything about you...’
“Who are you?! What do you want?!” she screamed, the fear cracking her voice, and turned swiftly, expecting empty darkness to whisper again in her ear.
To her obvious horror, there was a man standing, just outside the circle of the streetlamp's light, so that his black clothes seemed to melt into the shadows and the white porcelain mask he wore was cast with sharp eerie highlights. It was the face of a Renaissance cherub, staring out from under a dark hood as if freshly ripped from the front of the statue’s marble skull, white with empty dark sockets. The bottom half of the cherub’s face had been cracked off, severing the porcelain in a jagged edge that revealed only the man’s pale narrow chin and the small leering smile that stained his lips, barely a shade darker than the smooth ivory.
Perched between the edge of the orange light and the engulfing darkness, the pale mouth beneath the cherub began to laugh and reached toward her with a hand gloved in white, so that it seemed to float out of the dark like a fragment of a ghost.
A bloodcurdling scream rent the night air above the alleyway, mingled with strangled sobs and the scrambling footfalls of terrified flight.
Alone, in the orange glow just outside the spotlight of the streetlamp, stood the hooded man wearing the cracked porcelain face of an angel, his gloved hand still outstretched. The pale mouth smiled in the grotesque light, grinning gently over the fallen groceries, his smile like the flicker of a flame over wood:
“Sayonara, Ma-Lyn....”
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1
From behind the glass, her scream was as silent as the grave. It didn’t take a third eye to make out the words she was sobbing:
‘Hiei! Help me, Hiei, please! Help me!’
With his hands pressed against the thick glass, he could feel the percussion of her fists pounding on the other side. He was so unbearably close, and yet there was nothing he could do. Watching her cry his name and beat herself against the glass was killing him as surely as it was killing her.
Hiei clenched his teeth so tightly his ears rang, and she swam in his vision as she clawed at the smooth glass and screamed for him to save her as loud as she could. The container was an empty hourglass just large enough for her to turn in panicked circles where she stood, and he could practically see the air inside getting thinner and thinner as she hammered at the glass and cried.
He pressed his whole body against the double-curve of the thick hourglass as if he could will himself to pass through it to reach her. Hiei’s face was so near hers that he could see the tears caught in her eyelashes and the quick blurs of fog on the glass from her belabored breathing.
His throat clenched convulsively; she was running out of air, already.
“Ma-Lyn! Stop moving!” Hiei yelled at the glass, praying she could hear.
The girl inside the glass thrashed even more desperately. ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ she mouthed, more tears rolling down her face. Her breathing was becoming even heavier and the fists she beat against the glass were trembling weakly.
“Stop, Ma-Lyn! Don’t talk!” Even as he said this, the girl’s eyelids began to sag sleepily and her fists loosened. She leaned against the curved wall, and started to slip down to her knees while her hands dragged along the glass.
“Ma-Lyn!” Hiei cried, smashing his fists into the thick glass over and over in his desperation. “Ma-Lyn!” The girl had locked eyes with him, even as she sank to her knees inside the hourglass, and he couldn’t look away. A fear like he’d never felt before was numbly swallowing him as he watched her eyes flutter.
He couldn’t even hear his own voice screaming her name.
Her eyelids fluttered shut once, and her lips mumbled something swallowed by the thick glass.
Hiei’s fists were past the point of being sore; they could have been bleeding or broken as he battered the invulnerable glass, without feeling any of the pain that lanced up his arms.
Her eyes fell shut.
Hiei’s panic was absolute.
She slumped over, one hand lingered against the glass for a moment, and she lay still on the floor of the hourglass.
Hiei woke with a small choked cry, and the sound of a teargem skittering across the floor in the dark. The solitary noise dwindled into quiet as it rolled towards the corner. His ears were ringing.
It was only another nightmare....
Across the room, Kazutaka’s long white fingers closed over the tiny rolling object. He remained motionless where he sat in the corner, watching Hiei. Kazutaka barely blinked as the other man covered his face with his hands and lay back on his futon, completely unaware of far more than just his roommate being awake. His dreams were only the ghosts of the things that haunted him.
It was an hour before Hiei’s restless tossing and turning ceased and his breathing became deep and relaxed in the silence of the apartment. Kazutaka’s good eye traced the dim silhouette of Hiei’s face for the thousandth time that night, and came to rest hauntingly on the curve of his sleeping eyelashes. He rolled the tiny black gem between his fingertips, watching the peaceful rise and fall of Hiei’s chest beneath the blanket. Satisfied that there would be nothing more to worry about tonight, Kazutaka closed his fist lightly around Hiei’s teargem and let his head fall back against the wall with a long quiet breath.
A length of time passed in silence as he lingered, watching the faintly breathing silhouette as if in a trance.
Finally looking away from his roommate’s sleeping face, Kazutaka ran a hand through his short silver hair and slowly crept back to his own futon. Before he settled under the blanket, he placed the teargem in a small wooden box with a black dragon painted across the cover, where it clicked against the many others crowded inside it.
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2
Hiei was lost in thought from virtually the moment he woke and went to the cramped little bathroom to brush the unpleasant taste of morningbreath from his mouth.
He had to blink his bleary eyes a few times as he watched the toothpaste blob out of the half-flattened tube onto his brush. He stuck it in his mouth and glanced up into his own tired scarlet eyes in the mirror as he put the toothpaste away. There was a smudge of dark purple and heavy lines under each one, and they refused to open up all the way, as if he ought to be going to bed now instead of just waking.
God, I really look like s**t, he thought with an inward groan, and used both index fingers to stretch down his eyelids until two red crescents showed under his eyeballs and he looked like a groggy ghoul with a yellow plastic toothbrush sticking out of its mouth.
‘Hi-chan, you’re such a dork! Hahahahaha!’
Hiei let his face snap back and started to brush his teeth without putting any real effort into it. He stared at his tired looking reflection; right in the eye, as if he could see directly inside himself to where the problem was. But he knew the problem already. It was all in his head and he just couldn’t get over it.
She had always laughed and called him a dork when he made that face.
He stared at his reflection hard in the mirror. Why hadn’t he believed her when things started to fall apart? How could he have doubted her? Right when it counted...
Damn it....
Hiei spat forcefully into the sink, mildly realizing that when you were in a mood like his, brushing your teeth could almost be called therapeutic. Hiei spit again, putting some real oomph into it this time, and then went out to the kitchen to see what there was for breakfast, still half lost in thought.
How long had it been?
Almost a year, he realized heavily. Tomorrow would be the anniversary of her disappearance.
Kazutaka was at the stove, frying up eggs and bacon, as Hiei came into the section of their apartment marked as “the kitchen” by the tiled floor. He flopped haggardly into one of the chairs around the tiny kitchen table. A year sounded a great deal shorter than it felt. Now that he thought about it, it had seemed like a sizable chunk of forever had passed since Ma-Lyn had first been reported missing.
The scrape of the spatula in the skillet announced that the food was done as Kazutaka transferred the eggs and strips of bacon to plates. One of the plates hovered just beneath Hiei’s nose until he blinked, and then looked up at Kazutaka’s pleasant expression.
“Morning. Did you get enough sleep?”
“Yeah,” Hiei lied, and immediately yawned.
He took the plate with a scowl and a mumbled “Thanks”, and shoveled egg into his mouth without waiting. Kazutaka set a mug of black coffee in front of him and stirred in a heaping spoonful of powdered chocolate.
“Any races today? Kitchen’s closed, so I’m off work.” Hiei looked up from his eggs and noticed the coffee. “Mind if I come watch?” Kazutaka asked as Hiei picked up the steaming mug to take a sip.
“I don’t care.” Hiei said, as offhandedly as always, and drank some of the coffee. His eyebrows rose up in mild surprise at the mug beneath his nose, and as soon as he finished drinking said, “Good coffee. What’d you do to it?”
“Nothing.” Kazutaka replied quietly, turning back to the stove to hide the small smile that touched his face.
It was just a slight, happy curve of the lips, but it faded a little sadly as Kazutaka glanced out the window above the white countertop. He couldn’t really blame Hiei, it was just part of how he was. He couldn’t expect him to remember something as small to him as what the weather had been on that day. Even so, he didn’t know why he let it bother him. Hiei seemed to have honestly forgotten. And Ma-Lyn, even a year later, was still as close to his heart as she had ever been, he thought, remembering the dozens of tiny black gems hidden in the box on his dresser.
Kazutaka started to stack the dishes in the sink and run the hot water as he listened to the subtle sounds of Hiei finishing the breakfast he had made for him. It just wasn’t fair; even though she was long gone, she would probably always mean more to Hiei than he would.... No, Kazutaka corrected himself; it wasn’t supposed to be fair. Life was not fair. He had known that even before he’d met Hiei or Ma-Lyn.
He sank his hands into the scalding hot dishwater, and almost chuckled a little bitterly to himself at this. Back then, even when he’d broken every rule in his way, he still couldn’t get what he wanted. And he had wanted it so badly.
But those were the days of Muraki Kazutaka, not ¹ Mitsukeru Kazutaka. And there was no point in letting a cup of under-appreciated coffee get to him, eventhough it was selfish, and therefore just the sort of thing he would do. It didn’t matter in the larger scheme. It was just a damn cup of coffee. What mattered now, to Mitsukeru Kazutaka, was not quite getting what he wanted, but keeping it. By whatever means necessary.
Hiei’s chair scraped across the tiled floor as he got up from the table with his empty mug and plate.
Yes... I already have so much of what I want, Kazutaka thought as he watched Hiei place the dishes on the counter next to the sink. It wouldn’t do to ruin a good thing just because I want more.
Hiei’s footsteps receded into his room to get dressed while Kazutaka stood with his hands in the dishwater. He glanced over at Hiei’s empty mug: not a drop remained in the bottom of the cup. The slight curve of his lips returned, and he continued to scrub the skillet clean under the soapy water.
Hiei was always such a test of his self-control; always so callous and blunt. And god, Hiei could be dense, but Kazutaka wasn’t ever quite sure whether he was glad of it or not. He didn’t think anything good could come of Hiei realizing even half of the things he was currently not aware of. Everything was for the better with Hiei oblivious. It didn’t matter how it made Kazutaka feel; if he let anything slip, if he was reckless like he had been before, then everything he had done would be wasted. Everything he had painstakingly controlled and covered up and taken care of would go straight to hell, exactly like before.
It was what he told himself every time he was tempted to do or say anything that might jeopardize the carefully constructed niche Mitsukeru Kazutaka had carved out for the two of them; himself and Hiei. He was content to work quietly behind the scenes as a puppetmaster pulling strings, and he would not let his old ways—Muraki Kazutaka’s old ways—ruin what he had worked so hard to keep. Kazutaka often had to remind himself that he was not like that anymore; he was Mitsukeru now. Muraki had had his chance, and it had landed him and the one he wanted in the middle of a black inferno.
Hiei, now fully dressed in jeans and his leather jacket, crossed to the door of their apartment with his shiny, pitch-black helmet under his arm, and called over his shoulder, “The races start at noon. On the stretch of road behind the old parking garage. Don’t die getting there.” Hiei said shortly, as close to a goodbye as he would ever get.
“Don’t die.” Kazutaka responded, as the door closed.
His hands became still in the foamy dishwater as he stood still and listened to the sound of Hiei’s racing-bike revving up and motoring away down the boulevard, no doubt far over the speed limit.
“Yeah... don’t die....” Kazutaka mused quietly into the empty apartment, and allowed himself to think back to that time when he’d changed. When he gave up taking the direct approach to get what he wanted and put cruel Doctor Muraki in the dark, supposedly for good.
That was the day he had become Mitsukeru Kazutaka, and started to blur the line between pretending and becoming something he was not. But he would have been a fool to think that Mitsukeru was entirely real and Muraki was entirely gone.
What he was now, Kazutaka could not really say.
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Muraki Kazutaka had supposedly died in the enormous fire that happened more than a year and four months ago at the Shinigami Bureau of Human Affairs. He was a remorseless serial killer, and he would stop at nothing to possess a shinigami named Asato Tsuzuki. But all that changed when Tsuzuki’s shikigami, Touda, intervened and turned the flames surrounding them black. Touda’s infamous black flames swallowed everything, and Muraki Kazutaka had but a small margin by which to escape; his only other choice was to die in the black flames with Asato Tsuzuki.
Perhaps it was sheer selfishness that allowed Muraki to choose to live, rather than follow Tsuzuki, but nonetheless, he escaped and never looked back. That night half of the Bureau of Human Affairs burned to the ground in the inextinguishable black flames.
He sought refuge at his old friend Oriya’s establishment, and hid there for a week solid in his room, refusing to answer the door for anyone but Oriya himself. Many times his friend tried to ask what had happened and where he was going, and many times Muraki refused to answer. He said only that he had to go somewhere far away from what he had done. A short time after, Muraki left his friend’s establishment, so swiftly that he seemed to vanish without a trace. That was the last time the name Muraki Kazutaka was heard.
For almost a month, Kazutaka wandered from place to place, searching himself as much as the land around him. He scrutinized himself so thoroughly that he couldn’t have remembered everything that went through his mind even if he tried. It all seemed to pass in a massive blur of scenery and faces, until he scraped the bottom of his wallet and had to reexamine his options. He had survived countless police investigations, dozens of scuffles with the Bureau of Human Affairs, and the lethal black flames of Touda, and never once stopped. Of all the things to bring him to a halt; it was going broke.
He must have sat on the curb and laughed like the madman he was all night until the crack of dawn. It was just that funny.
By the time the sun came up, Kazutaka had decided to bury Muraki with the ashes of the Bureau of Human Affairs and Asato Tsuzuki.
Mitsukeru Kazutaka was the one to walk into the first restaurant he saw and spend his last dollar on a proper breakfast. It was there that he struck up an extraordinarily dull conversation with a waitress whose nametag read: ‘² Nusumu Ma-Lyn’. She was a chatty girl with an abnormal amount of sympathy for complete strangers, especially charming handsome ones with silver hair, and offered to let Kazutaka stay with her until he could find a place of his own.
“Aren’t you worried I might try something at night?” Kazutaka asked, obviously surprised at her lack of caution, as he stabbed a bite of pancake with his fork.
The girl shook her pigtailed head with a big naïve smile, “If you’ll pardon my saying so; I kinda got the vibe that you were gay.”
Kazutaka choked on his pancake.
As he cleared his throat behind a napkin, he thought wryly; I can’t decide whether to call this particular knife dull or sharp.
But then, this girl was just a child still. Hell, Muraki had killed his share of much hotter, craftier, and more intelligent women. This one was nothing to worry about.
“I do appreciate your generosity, especially seeing as I’m not in much of a position to refuse,” Kazutaka admitted, “but I have no money, and no job to pay you back with.”
“Hmm...” the pigtailed waitress made a thoughtful face and tilted her head as her plain brown eyes roved around the restaurant. “How are you at cooking, Mr...?”
“Mitsukeru Kazutaka. Please just call me Kazutaka.”
“Mr. Kazutaka, then. How would you be at cooking in a place like this, you think?”
“Well, I suppose I know a bit. Why?” he responded coolly, unable to keep from thinking of the few extremely successful occasions that Muraki had cooked his specialty meat—human—and managed to pawn it off as five-star gourmet.
“Oh, see, our chef told me he was submitting a letter of resignation because he found something bigger, or whatever that means. It’s not really my business, I guess, but it would be awfully convenient for the next applicant to be familiar with the menu and have a place to practice.” Nusumu Ma-Lyn’s smile was bright and seemingly naïve as she averted her eyes in a sneaky side-glance.
Kazutaka was beginning to like this girl.
“I see...” Kazutaka gave her his most charming smile, “now, how much do I owe you for this delicious breakfast?”
It didn’t take more than a day to impress Nusumu Ma-Lyn with his culinary prowess, and in another week, he had mastered the majority of the restaurant’s menu to perfection. The job was as good as his the second he walked through the restaurant door, and the owner was only too happy to hire such an informed, handsome gentleman for ³Mado no Daidokoro’s staff. In fact, he was almost ecstatic enough to shake Kazutaka’s hands—both of them—several times, with a slight blush coloring his face. The poor man appeared to be slightly crestfallen to hear that Kazutaka was staying with Ma-Lyn. All Kazutaka could do was smile sheepishly and let the owner believe what he wanted. It didn’t matter to him what this man thought; he had gotten the job.
Kazutaka could not have asked for a better situation: A place to stay and a new job that just about dropped into his lap. Kazutaka almost considered going to a temple and giving thanks for his good luck. Almost. A change of career would cover his tracks even further, just in case the Bureau of Human Affairs was still looking for him, and put that much more distance between Muraki and Mitsukeru. However, he was by no means fool enough to let his guard down now.
In a few weeks, Kazutaka had earned enough to secure his own apartment on the other side of town from Ma-Lyn’s place. His new residence turned out to be much closer to the restaurant than hers, so the two of them saw each other mostly at work. They remained casual friends and chatted together on their breaks, but there were often times when Kazutaka could feel an enormous gap between himself and Ma-Lyn.
She was just a normal girl who was too innocent to ever know about the darker side of the world around her. The side of the world that Muraki Kazutaka had once thrived in. It was these times that he would feel Muraki’s restless madness bubbling up in him, and remind himself that Tsuzuki was dead because of his old ways. It was the only remorse Muraki Kazutaka had ever really felt, and therefore, Mitsukeru Kazutaka’s only weapon against him. And Nusumu Ma-Lyn was just the kind of daily reminder he needed.
She overflowed with innocence; a thing that Kazutaka had always had difficulty holding on to. Every mundane conversation they shared helped Kazutaka to push Muraki deeper and farther away, so he forced himself to find something pleasantly intriguing about the news of her cousin’s recent engagement, or mildly saddening to hear of an elderly couple who perished in a house fire in the next city over. What did he care that her cousin was getting married? What did another two dead people mean to him if he hadn’t been the one to set fire to their house? All that mattered was that Muraki was gradually fading as he completely immersed himself in this new, inhumanly dull existence as Mitsukeru Kazutaka.
However, a profoundly interesting thing was to come to him, in the most discreet and fleeting of moments.
And it would change so much; by his very own hands.
Or perhaps they were Muraki’s.... He couldn’t seem to recall.
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4
It was a Saturday.
He was positive; it was a Saturday.
He had been closing up the restaurant for the night—everyone, including the owner, had gone home already—and it must have been close to midnight as Kazutaka was putting the key into the lock of the front entrance of Mado no Daidokoro. The large panes of glass that made up the front windows and double doors were dark and glowing faintly from the few fluorescent lights that stayed on all night inside the locked restaurant. The glare of the streetlights was reflected on the outsides of the glass panes, and Kazutaka could see the image of the quiet, empty boulevard that was the main artery of all the shops in town, laid out black and flat behind him.
The faint rumble of a motor reached Kazutaka’s inhumanly keen ears. He stood still as a statue, watching the dark windows of Mado no Daidokoro, and waited.
The rumbling noise grew louder; echoing from all parts of the deserted street until it was almost impossible to tell which direction the vehicle was coming from. Still Kazutaka did not move. Until the last moment, he remained as still as any of the streetlights or occasional trashcans that lined the road.
It was only with mild curiosity, as to who in this smotheringly mundane place would be out in the middle of the night, that Kazutaka turned around to face the street, as the roar of the engine took on the high-pitched whine characteristic of motorcycles going far too fast.
It came from the right; screaming down the yellow line at the very center of the boulevard at blurring speed. It took a fraction of a second for the motorist to wail by—going so fast that, had Kazutaka blinked, he might have missed it entirely—but the image of the rider blazing down the boulevard like he could fly was instantly branded into his mind’s eye, as if Kazutaka had seen it all in slow motion:
The motorcycle was a sleek, black racing bike that reflected the streetlights as flashes across its polished surface and skipped over the studded leather of the bike’s seat. But it was the man riding the bike, like a roaring arrow down the middle of the road, that sparked a feeling of such awesome fascination in Kazutaka.
He was wearing a leather jacket that flapped in the slipstream like a heavy black flag, and the tightest pair of jeans Kazutaka had ever seen. The man wore no helmet, and his spiky black hair had a stark blaze of white that fluttered back from his forehead, which the rider had covered with a tightly secured strip of white cloth. He was leaned forward over the handlebars, half-crouching above the leather seat, he glared fixedly at the asphalt ahead, as if his whole being was merged with his bike, seeing a thousand miles of road stretched out in front of him into the night. The fierce magnetism of his expression drew Kazutaka in with him as the rider swept away, surrounded by only the whipping night air and the solitary keening roar of his motorcycle, which faded away and left Kazutaka, all too suddenly rooted to the spot in front of the Mado no Daidokoro, lost in a stunned daze.
Kazutaka couldn’t be sure how long he had stood there, or what time he had gotten back to his apartment. He seemed to be possessed by the image of the man on the speeding bike. It had given him the strangest thrill, and each time he remembered it, it almost quickened his pulse—which was unheard of for him.
There was just something about the way that man had ridden, careening down the road like a roaring shadow without a shred of fear, that had felt inhuman to Kazutaka. It was a connection, almost, because he himself was not quite human. And to leave such a powerful impression in the flash of a moment—one that felt so uniquely familiar—was kin to seductive. In that moment the rider had passed, a shadow of Muraki had seemed to rise up in him, as if to commune with this kindred soul, and Mitsukeru Kazutaka could do nothing but stand in awe of the reminder of what he had once been. It was that same sort of darkly blazing aura that Kazutaka had felt as he watched the bike zip past, and in that second, he had become obsessed.
Even as he lay on top of his futon, imagining the roar of a motorcycle thrumming beneath the silence in his new apartment, Kazutaka was so caught-up in reliving the moment that the motorist had passed by that he barely noticed he was falling asleep...
All during the next day, Kazutaka kept losing himself in thought about the compelling motorist from the night before, and nearly burnt a few customers’ meals beyond recognition. He found himself dipping into his past vocabulary to find swearwords powerful enough to express his frustration as he scraped one of his specialty dishes out of the pan, and looking at the residue of black ash it left behind.
The Mado no Daidokoro was to close in the afternoon. The place always closed early on Sundays, and thankfully, on this particular one, there were few customers.
Therefore, it came as a real jolt to Kazutaka’s senses when Ma-Lyn came blundering into the restaurant’s kitchen with her face peeking out from behind her round, plastic serving tray, almost in tears about a strange customer who had just come in.
“I– I just thought that– that he might.... but h-he was... and I just couldn’t! He’s just so scary!” Ma-Lyn babbled, and then bit her lips together and hid her nose behind the tray.
Kazutaka raised an eyebrow and gave her a bemused look, “Come again...?”
Ma-Lyn took a deep breath and tried again, more slowly; “He came in and sat down, and I went over to greet him.... because I’m supposed to do that....”
Kazutaka nodded reassuringly, while resisting the urge to say something sarcastic.
“Well, he didn’t really know what to order... and I just thought maybe, because he looked like the really cool biker type...”
Kazutaka’s derision was gone instantly. ‘Biker type’...? No. It couldn’t be... There’s just no way...
“...that he might want to just have a cup of coffee.” Ma-Lyn finished, her voice developing a slight pout, “But that man’s just so scary! I couldn’t go back there by myself...” She looked at Kazutaka imploringly from behind the serving tray.
There wasn’t much need for pleading, only a bit of light sarcasm to hide his irrational excitement as he went to grab a white ceramic mug from one of the metal shelves. Kazutaka was sure it couldn’t be him, but he had to see it for himself, otherwise the doubt would have driven him crazy. There was nothing that could have kept him in that kitchen, not while there was even the slightest possibility that it could be him. Kazutaka hesitated when it came to the coffee, then filled the cup with the caffinated stuff, thinking that if—and it was a huge ‘if’—it really was who it might be, the more chatting he was compelled to do, the better. Half thinking himself a fool, Kazutaka left the kitchen, coffee in hand, and with Ma-Lyn trailing shyly behind her serving tray.
“Over there, in the corner.” She whispered, without noticing that it wouldn’t have mattered if she had said he was ‘north of Hokkaido’ (which would have been in the middle of the sea).
Kazutaka was already staring at the man, who sat in an isolated corner, on the other side of the restaurant entirely from the handful of other customers. He had recognized the mysterious motorist immediately, and had almost completely forgotten the cup of coffee he was holding. He just couldn’t believe it.
It was as if the stranger he had been thinking about all day had walked out of his thoughts and through the door of Mado no Daidokoro, and there he sat, looking moodily out the window as if he had no idea what he was doing here.
“Well... go!” Ma-Lyn hissed and poked Kazutaka in the back, and he suddenly remembered about the coffee as it sloshed out of the mug and scalded his hand.
The man in his leather jacket and jeans glanced uneasily around at the few other customers as Kazutaka approached him with his coffee, his hand still smarting from the burn. The man shot Kazutaka through with a stinging glance as soon as he noticed him, and watched him warily as he came to the table.
Kazutaka could see why Ma-Lyn had said he was scary; the man had the sharpest glance he had ever seen, and it had nothing to do with his striking red irises. The man’s face seemed to be drawn in a perpetual frown, which he swept around the restaurant as if he might need to escape at any given moment.
“Here you are, sir. Your coffee; black.” Kazutaka said to the man, who was now looking at the mug like it could be laced with poison.
The man’s black feathery hair was just as Kazutaka remembered it. He had thought that it was only the phenomenal speed at which he was driving his motorcycle that had made it stand up so well; apparently it was naturally that unruly and spiky, and the white blaze was even more eye-catching in daylight. But Kazutaka couldn’t seem to dislike it. He couldn’t help thinking, that when it wasn’t being tossed around by a hundred-mile-an-hour wind, the man’s hair looked like it might be quite soft.
While Kazutaka’s mind had run away with him, the unusual man had picked up the mug and taken a sip. The stranger’s frown deepened significantly, “It’s bitter,” he said shortly, and put the mug down.
“Uh... Would you like some cream? Or something to sweeten it?” Kazutaka offered quickly, to hide that he hadn’t been paying attention.
The man’s face relaxed a little, and he instantly replied: “Chocolate.”
Kazutaka hurried away to get powdered cocoa from its place on the spice-rack in the kitchens. As he grabbed the tin, he saw the red welt splashed across his hand, from the same molten beverage that the spiky black-haired man had just drank. And even more intriguingly, Kazutaka thought as he went back out to the table, the man seemed surprised that the coffee was bitter. Hadn’t he ever tasted coffee before?
Kazutaka felt the same piercing stare on him as he set a teaspoon and the tin of powdered cocoa near the steaming mug. He watched as the stranger scooped a heaping spoonful of chocolate into his mug and stirred.
“Pardon my saying so, but I haven’t seen anyone like you around here before,” Kazutaka attempted awkwardly to start a conversation, “Are you a tourist, or just passing through?”
“No,” the man snorted shortly as he put down the spoon. The inherent frown relaxed again as the man tasted the sweetened coffee, and taking a second drink, apparently liked it.
“Are you new around here then,” Kazutaka pressed, “Where are you staying?”
“....”
The man’s harsh scarlet eyes glanced away, pointedly avoiding Kazutaka’s question as the man in black leather looked out one of the restaurant’s big windows and sipped his coffee.
The gears in Kazutaka’s mind began to click. “If you’re looking for an apartment...”
Immediately, the man’s piercing red gaze flashed back to meet Kazutaka’s ash-gray ones, and again he was struck by the unearthly fierceness he saw in this stranger.
“...I’ve got a room for rent.” Kazutaka finished the offer.
Technically, it was only a half-lie. The room for rent he was talking about was his. The new apartment Kazutaka had was on the large side for only one person, especially one who worked full-time besides. It did have an extra room, and it would also be much easier to have two people split the rent he was currently paying. Kazutaka was counting on his offer to be exactly what the other man was looking for. This stranger was far too fascinating to just let slip by. He was too rare, too much of a mystery in this stiflingly ordinary place.
“How much?” the man asked, audible suspicion stopping his drink before it reached his mouth. The mug hovered near his wary frown as his sharp scarlet glare watched Kazutaka through the steam.
“Half the usual; 400 or so.” Kazutaka replied smoothly, without breaking the man’s penetrating gaze.
Thoughtfully, the stranger glanced down into his coffee and took another slow drink, shifting his eyes pensively towards the window. Kazutaka was not worried; his price was more than reasonable, and he all but had his answer as soon as the man had asked for it. Though, he would have been lying if he had said the stranger’s ongoing silence wasn’t making him anxious.
The man glanced into his coffee again, sipping deliberately as he mulled through his private thoughts. He pursed and licked his lips clean of coffee before finally looking back up to where Kazutaka stood, waiting far less patiently than he appeared to be for the stranger’s answer. When he finally spoke, he spoke tersely and looked away out the window again, as if the response had been forced out of him.
“...Fine.” And he raised the mug to his mouth for another drink.
Kazutaka hid his relief well, “Alright. If you don’t mind waiting around for an hour, when we close, I can take you there.”
“Hn,” was the man’s only response, and he did not look up from the window.
A ghostly smile of triumph cast itself unconsciously over Kazutaka’s lips as he turned away. Ma-Lyn looked puzzlingly at him as he passed her on his way to the kitchens, and he quickly corrected his expression. For a moment, it had slightly alarmed him how much like Muraki he was acting.
Back in Mado no Daidokoro’s kitchen, Ma-Lyn gushed.
“You were so brave, Mr. Kazutaka! I would’ve been so nervous!”
Perhaps she had forgotten, Kazutaka mused dryly, that she was the one cowering behind a plastic tray during the whole encounter. But instead, he forced himself to smile and feign modesty, “It was just a simple cup of coffee.” He was beginning to be annoyed by how idiotic his new life was forcing him to be.
Ma-Lyn trailed after him partway into the kitchens as Kazutaka pulled a dingy white rag from his apron pocket and started to clean up the lingering smudges on the dull metal countertops. She leaned over the counter, purposely, in the middle of the spot Kazutaka was cleaning, wearing one of her childishly sneaky grins, “Hey, you know, that guy’s pretty good looking. Maybe I should ask him out.”
Kazutaka looked up from the steel counter dubiously, washcloth in hand, at the waitress flopped in the middle of his workspace, “A moment ago, you could barely stand in that man’s presence, let alone speak to him.”
Ma-Lyn’s cheeks puffed up angrily, “Hmph! I can do it, you’ll see!” She flounced through the swinging kitchen door, forgetting her round plastic serving tray on the counter.
Again the eerie smile touched Kazutaka's face, only this time it was from amusement. Right then, the thought that Ma-Lyn might actually win over that callous, leather-clad stranger was quite laughable.
He'd never imagined she would get in the way.
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5
It was barely nine o’clock when Hiei kicked open the heavy metal door of the apartment complex and stalked out into the nauseatingly sunny parking lot.
Goddamn sunshine, Hiei’s scowl scrunched as he squinted at his gleaming black motorcycle waiting in its spot. Jesus, he couldn’t wait to be on his bike. But he knew it would be agony walking over to it. It always was.
It was a constant aggravation to walk at normal human speed, not just because he was anxious to be on his bike, but all the time. Anytime he had to walk, he felt agonizingly slow having to move at a speed so far below what he was capable of. It was maddening. And he cursed the lousy pencil-pushers of Reikai every day for holding him to such a stupid rule.
Goddamn desk-monkeys...
In such a mundane place as the Ningenkai, getting along without his more conspicuous abilities was not so difficult. A katana did nothing but attract unnecessary attention here anyway, and his Black Dragon Wave was an even more redundant tool. But his Jagan Eye was a whole other matter. It was subtle enough to use amongst humans without detection, and Hiei was constantly tempted to peel back the barriers of the human minds around him, to whatever advantage it might give. In a real scrape he might have been allowed to use its Sight, but that was pushing it. And under absolutely no circumstances could his Jagan be seen by anyone.
Hiei had been restricted to an average human existence, and anything that chanced to compromise it, anything that even smelled of demonic power, bore severe consequences. The slightest glimpse of flashing speed or fiery dark ki in ningen eyes would land Hiei a first-class ticket to Reikai, and the Purgatory division of Hell.
All for the simple crime of violating his parole, one too many times more than the higher-ups of Reikai knew what to do with him. And for that, it was very well seen-to that he would never be allowed to use any of his powers again.
For the first few weeks of his banishment, Hiei had lived like a homeless vagabond, fruitlessly swearing the wrath of all of Makai down on the self-superior bastards. Try as he might to find a place to use his speed without being seen, Hiei met with humans everywhere he went. They were like rats or insects; there must have been a million of them to make it so impossible to get away from their infuriating presence. Hiei was just about rabid by the time he came across the perfect outlet for his frustrations:
A motorcycle.
He knew it was the answer to everything that tortured him the second he saw it, black as pitch and gleaming like unholy treasure.
It was simple to steal it, and once he was astride the leather seat and moving, Hiei felt the whole world lay down before him as it had before. The deafening roar of the engine and the numbing vibration of the handlebars went through his entire body, and it felt like raw power was once again under his control; the ghost of his demon ki rumbling through his bones. Hiei opened the throttle and the bike shrieked straight forward, careening down the road at full speed like a bat out of hell, and for the first time in months, a real grin cracked Hiei’s lips.
Oh, it was fantastic! He could feel the wind ripping at his clothes and his hair was streaming back from his forehead, like his body was slicing effortlessly through something thick and solid that was holding him back. That feeling of having broken every barrier in existence was exhilarating, and Hiei could feel the speed pulsing in every drop of blood in his veins, every cell in his body, every shred of his being. He was made of it; he always had been. And without this sheer velocity, he would never be sane, and he knew it. He knew that it would drive him mad not to feel the world rushing past, not to feel everything melting into one long blur on either side, until there was nothing left but what was in front of him, and he could see it stretched out limitlessly along the black asphalt road.
It was the one thing in the whole of the Ningenkai that made Hiei remember who he was: not some weak helpless human, but a fire demon, and a damn fast one too. In all those weeks, Hiei had lost what distinguished him from the millions of other beings—all of them humans—ignorantly walking the Ningenkai. He had lost his grip on his sense of self, and let himself wander aimlessly through their staggering numbers until he had almost forgotten what he had been.
If Hiei had never come across his racing bike, he didn’t know what he would have done. It was the only thing that helped Hiei escape whatever was nagging him. All he needed to do was swing his leg over, twist the throttle, and the he was untouchable again.
And untouchable was just where he wanted to be.
Especially since he had so many things he wanted to escape.
Hiei’s fist closed securely around the handlebar of his bike, remembering all the miles of asphalt that had passed beneath the tires of his motorcycle, and all the hours of blissful wind that had blotted out the world around him whenever he needed to be both somewhere and nowhere. The bike was just as much a part of him now as the air he breathed to keep living.
He shifted the shiny black helmet from underneath his arm, and stared at his bowed reflection in the dark surface.
It had been a gift from Ma-Lyn. Hiei had no real use for a helmet. Even if he wrecked his precious motorcycle in such a way that no man could survive; it wasn’t as if he was like any ningen man. He wasn’t some brittle human that would die from a simple high-velocity impact. Hiei had been through—and was quite capable of—far worse than that. The most it could do was hurt like hell.
It had worried her that he didn’t care about his own safety; that was why she bought it for him.
That simple naiveté of hers was what he had gotten attached to.
It reminded him of Yukina.
His little sister; a koorime—an ice maiden. Lost to him once at birth, and now lost to him permanently in his banishment from Makai. He couldn’t even watch over her from a safe distance anymore, which was the last saving grace he had left. He had needed her, even if she wasn’t aware of it. Just her presence seemed to heal him, ease the suffering of living as an unwanted Forbidden Child. She was the only one who still looked for him, still thought of him, the only one who had ever felt sorrow for him. Simply by existing, she completed him. She was everything he was not: kind, gentle, compassionate, forgiving...
That he found most amazing about her: Hiei never forgave anyone for anything, especially himself.
Ma-Lyn was so much like Yukina that way. It wasn’t that she pitied others, but that she honestly felt for them. Ma-Lyn had constantly been saving Hiei from his own self-destructiveness, shouldering as much of his burdens as she could carry. He had always been masochistic when it came to his past, and instead of letting him alone to brood, she had done something to make him look to the future. She had always been so full of hope, and when she smiled at him, she could make him see all the wonder in the world like a clear, shining beacon, instead of selfish hardhearted multitudes of ningen skulking behind their locked doors. She wore the innocence of a saint on her sleeve, and whatever she did, she did with the gusto of one who had never entirely left childhood. She felt the weight of responsibility in everything, for everything, and she would run herself ragged because of it if given half the chance. And when she was at her limit, as he had seen only once, she found a quiet place to sit down and cry her heart out. It was especially painful for him to see when it was his troubles she was struggling with. Where Hiei had never consented to forgive himself, she forgave for him, regardless, and suffered in his place. In her compassion, Ma-Lyn was exactly like Yukina.
But no matter how like Yukina she was, no matter how pure and unique and special; Ma-Lyn would always be a human—one out of many thousands of ningen.
It was something that bothered Hiei more than he cared to admit.
Even before Ma-Lyn’s disappearance, he had always felt some tiny nagging irrational guilt that he was not human like she was. It was a stupid thing to feel guilty about, seeing as he hadn’t the smallest amount of choice in whether he had been born a fire demon or a human—of makai or ningen. But it bothered him nonetheless.
It had just always felt like he was constantly lying to her. Constantly pretending to be just another frail human, as easily cut and burned and broken as any of them. In her observant compassion, he had no secrets from her; she could tell whatever he was feeling immediately. But at the same time, she knew nothing about him, nothing at all. And in the shadow of every smile she gave him, Hiei felt wounded by the guilt of having to lie to her about everything, when she had never given him anything less than the heartfelt truth. Perhaps it was his honor being compromised that bothered him, or perhaps it was because every time he looked at her, he saw Yukina, staring back in all her wide-eyed innocence. Whatever the case, and whether or not his banishment was the real reason he couldn’t tell her the truth, he wasn’t the same person as the one she ‘knew’. His ‘entire life’ that she ‘knew all about’, was nothing more than a haphazardly fabricated lie.
He wasn’t ever sure if his awkward conversational shortcomings had helped his lies sound more like painfully-admitted truths, or if his halting words had exposed the falseness of them. It didn’t make much difference now, or much difference then, now that he thought about it, because no matter what he said, Ma-Lyn would have believed him, and Kazutaka was just as unfathomable as always.
His parents had died in a car crash, he had said, and because he couldn’t possibly conceive of writing Yukina out of even a made-up past, he told them that his little sister had been sent overseas to be adopted after the accident. He remembered how touched Ma-Lyn had been by the notion that he was still so close to little Yukina, eventhough they were so far apart.
Unfortunately, he had explained, his skull had been cracked in the accident, and had left him with almost no memory of his life before, and a gruesome scar on his forehead, which he must always keep covered with a headband. This lie had been the most awkward to tell, because he wasn’t sure whether it was something a normal human would find difficult to tell. He kept wondering if he should have tried to sound more emotional about it, while he sat very still and very quiet, acutely aware of the violet eye concealed by the thin white cloth underneath his fringe of hair. His Jagan had never felt like such a large, obviously unnatural part of his body to him as it did then, as he noticed them stealing quick glances up at his forehead. Kazutaka had seemed very interested in exactly how his skull had been fractured, exactly what had been done to treat it, and how long had it taken him to recover. All these questions were dangerous, and Hiei answered simply; ‘I don’t remember’, and while Kazutaka seemed to leave it at that, there was still a feeling of being scrutinized, examined with inhuman precision. He did not ask to see the ‘scar’, but his stare on Hiei’s forehead felt like the silver pierce of a scalpel, dissecting away the lies he was telling along with the feeble white cloth.
A bit too quickly perhaps, Hiei had groped for something else to tell, or rather, lie to them about. Anything to keep their stares from his forehead. Both Ma-Lyn and Kazutaka had been quite keen to know why his eyes were bright crimson red, and for a fraction of a second, Hiei floundered for an answer, almost wishing they would go back to staring at his forehead. Again, he would never really know whether he had feigned a painfully-recalled past convincingly enough to keep their suspicions at bay, but he summoned up another half-truth to feed their curiosity.
It was his mother, he’d told them, as quietly as he thought would be appropriate for such a memory, his mother had been partially albino. ‘White as the snow’, were the words he used, which were not entirely untrue in describing a koorime. Ma-Lyn had looked so moved that she might have started sniffling on the spot, and Hiei had hurriedly, and gruffly, changed the subject to Kazutaka’s hair; why it was silver and covered his right eye. He had wanted to show him what it would feel like to be ogled at and dissected while trying to explain himself.
Kazutaka had sat back on his sofa, nonchalantly touching the silver curtain over his right eye, and closed his left slowly with a tilt of his head, as if to shrug the question off. Then he said, carelessly, that he’d lost it in his highschool days when he was young and foolish enough to use knives for anything besides cooking. Ma-Lyn looked as horrified as she had been moved to tears a moment ago, and Kazutaka fingered a few strands of his hair, saying, ‘as for this, it’s always been this color, as long as I can remember.’ Then he chuckled a little, and Hiei found himself again fixed with that one hungrily dissecting eye that appeared to lurk behind Kazutaka’s glasses. ‘Perhaps I’m just a freak of nature’, he had mused, somewhat-less-than-seriously, only to be admonished by Ma-Lyn for speaking ill of himself.
Even now, more than a year later, Hiei wasn’t sure what to make of Mitsukeru Kazutaka. He was nothing like Ma-Lyn. In fact, he was nothing like anyone he had ever met. There was something about him, something as elusive as a metallic gleam, which was not quite human, or even, very slightly demonic.
At times, there was a strange smile that would play about his lips, but other than that, it was just a feeling.
In all the time that he and Ma-Lyn had become closely involved, Kazutaka had been present, if only because Hiei was splitting the rent for the apartment, and of course as a polite formality. They had become friends out of necessity, through group conversations between the three of them, usually with Ma-Lyn asking all the questions and volunteering more than half of the talk. Only once did Ma-Lyn try to bring up his past, and was met with a solid, unreceptive grey wall behind his glass lenses. ‘I’d rather let the past stay the past, if you don’t mind. It has nothing to do with the future or the present’, was all he said, with one of his mysterious smiles, and the issue had been dropped.
Kazutaka was subtle in everything that he did, subtle enough to go nearly unnoticed, but always thorough. Constantly observing with that one ghostly grey eye. He always gave the impression of being harmlessly unaware, and for the first few months Hiei’s suspicious paranoia had won out, keeping him constantly on his guard whenever Kazutaka was around. It went on like that for a ridiculously long time before, one night, a snatch of something human seemed to escape the pale, silver-haired man, and whether by chance or design, Hiei happened to be present to catch it.
Hiei remembered that the moon had just risen, and it was huge, tinted rouge in the metallic breeze. The tops of the buildings were sharp silhouettes scattered all around the rooftop, rising and stooping like square artificial plateaus against the low orange glow of the streets. Hiei had gone out to the roof, purely from restlessness and to get a little of the, without even noticing that the door was left ajar, and was startled more than he would have liked by a voice behind him as he pushed it soundlessly open.
‘Tsuzuki...’
It was more of a quiet murmur, to himself, as if the word were something important he was trying to remember, and when Hiei turned sharply, expecting to find the tall, silver man right behind him, he was taken aback, if only slightly.
Kazutaka was standing above him, on top of the boxlike brick doorway out onto the roof like a sentinel, shining a ghostly white against the huge, slightly red moon. He was gazing up at the sky almost regretfully, when the scuff of Hiei’s motorcycle boots made him glance abruptly down to the roof below him.
‘Mr. Jaganshi.’
It wasn’t a question, or an acknowledgement, as speaking someone’s name in their presence usually is, but to himself again, as if Hiei were not really there and Kazutaka had just begun to realize something that he had been pondering before.
‘I told you; my name is ‘Hiei’.’
Kazutaka’s strange smile had been a little different, a little softer, as he looked down on the callous man in black, searching his perpetual scarlet frown. To Kazutaka, on top of the doorway, lost in his own thoughts, and for once, unaware, Hiei had seemed to appear there out of the dark, as if in answer to the questions that had been plaguing him. Kazutaka glimpsed the surprise in those piercing red eyes, and had to admit some measure of amazement himself, to find that the smile on his own lips was in fact real.
‘Alright... Hiei, then.’
Hiei looked up at the pale man above the roof, instinctively covering his unease with hostility. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Kazutaka looked out over the dim silhouettes of the city buildings, ‘The same thing you were about to. But don’t let my being here bother you. I’m not done thinking either, so it will barely seem as if anyone is on this roof at all.’
It was difficult to forget that Kazutaka was above him nonetheless, and Hiei was still confused by the sudden glimpse of exposed personality that he had gotten. If Hiei wasn’t mistaken, that smile he had just seen on Kazutaka’s face was real and astonishingly unguarded. What could he have been thinking about to make such a change in him? And that word, ‘Tsuzuki...’ Was it the name of someone from his past? Maybe it was someone important, like a brother, in the way that Yukina was important to him. ‘His poor orphan sister, adopted overseas’.... how had he thought that up? And that sentimental garbage about his mother being ‘white as snow’. Feh. Why did he dwell on these things so often? He didn’t know, and he was tired of it. It seemed to sap the life from him; it made his whole being tired, even though he had done nothing except think. But he was tired of being so tired, and just then, all he wanted was to escape on his motorcycle....
‘Hiei.’
His head snapped around, but he didn’t answer; he had forgotten the other man was there and it had startled him to hear his name called.
Kazutaka was looking up at the sky again, full of weak dim stars, ‘....If you could have something, even if it was truly impossible to have, would you still try to steal it...?’
Hiei was silent. He watched Kazutaka’s passive face, white as a mask against his silver hair. Just watched.
Then he turned to go inside, and spoke just as he passed beneath Kazutaka’s feet through the open doorway: ‘If it was worth it...’
The door of the apartment roof closed with a harsh clack of the latch, and from above where Kazutaka stood, it seemed to meld into the flat wall of brick below him. He did not once look down from the sky above the city, and there was an acute sense that no one was present but the dark wind across the rooftops.
His lips wore no real smile, and he spoke in a whisper, as he had uttered the name before:
‘I think you will be.’
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Japanese Translation notes:
¹ Kazutaka’s new name means “to find”
² Ma-Lyn's surname means “to have something stolen”
³ the restaurant’s name means “the Kitchen Window”
 Mitsukeru Furidomu · Thu Oct 18, 2007 @ 08:32am · 0 Comments |
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