BLANKET WARNING(S) FOR: Foul language and blood. Lots of both.
((I've been working on this to get me out of a funk and back into writing the long-overdue conclusion to one of my other stories, "Future Talk." This is mostly for humor, mostly for me, mostly pretty silly with lots of gore and cursing. I watched YYH and the Predators reboot back to back; shit happened in my brain. Hope you enjoy!))
"This Vacation Officially Sucks"
A Yu Yu Hakusho & Predator crossover
By Graphospasm
"All right, that is it!" I bellowed. "This vacation officially sucks!"
Kuwabara tore his Spirit Sword out of the stomach of a massive purple critter that had a bunch of little feelers growing its face, and then he wiped his forehead with his wrist. One of the feelers had ripped off and landed in his hair; it looked like he had an octopus sprouting out of his head.
"Really, Urameshi?" he asked with forced astonishment. "You mean you're not having fun?"
For a moment I thought about what it would be like to rip off Kuwabara's dick for that comment, but I didn't actually go through with it, mostly because I didn't like the thought of touching Kuwabara's junk. Today had been bad enough already.
"Because I am having a fantastic time!" he said. The Sword in his fist disappeared when he gave me the finger. "That's right, fantastic! Fan-fucking-tastic! Because I always wanted to get chased halfway across a fucking continent by fucking aliens with fucking alien bloodhounds who want to rip my fucking balls off!"
I would have yelled at him right back had the trees above us not started to rustle. I took a wide stance and aimed my Spirit Gun at the moving leaves, powering the blast up to full strength in little more than a half second. Kuwabara started dual-wielding the Spirit Sword beside me. It was just Hiei, though, who came dropping out of the canopy to land on the ground in front of us with a grunt.
"I'll rip your fucking balls off if you don't shut the fuck up!" Hiei spat as he stood. He brandished his usual sword at his side; small scratches on his arms leaked blood onto his skin. He'd lost his cloak hours ago. "They're not far off now!"
"Which way they comin'?" I said.
Hiei pointed over his shoulder, grunting a little.
"Kurama get his shit done?"
Another grunt, possibly a 'yes'—and then I heard an actual 'yes' from behind me and Kurama came walking out of the brush like he owned the goddamn place. His normally almost-disgustingly-pretty hair wasn't as pretty as usual; jungle humidity had made it frizz, but that was basically the only damage Kurama had to show for our little jungle jaunt.
"Don't sneak up on us like that!" Kuwabara shrieked.
"I apologize," Kurama said. He came over and looked down at himself, and then the bastard started brushing off his jeans all delicate-like. "I wonder if I will ever get these stains out."
"You're joking," I said. The only stains on him were mud stains on his pant legs and a few drops of bright green blood on his collar; he'd worn white and how he didn't look as bedraggled as the rest of us was beyond me.
"I like this shirt," came his prim response.
I was starting to hate his fucking guts at that point. I mean, c'mon.
He turned serious while I imagined throwing mud on his best pants. "The traps are set," he said.
"Fuckin' peachy," I said. I settled back into my wide stance and aimed my Gun in the direction Hiei had pointed. "Get ready to play the welcoming committee, guys."
They settled in around me without a word. It was time to play the waiting game.
It was supposed to be a routine assignment, an in-and-out mission, a small favor for Spirit World—and it didn't hurt that we were getting a tropical vacation in the bargain. Hell, Koenma even fronted our plane tickets and hotel costs; no way was I passing this up, even if it did mean dedicating a few days to bushwhacking and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.
And also giant mutated dog-fuckers, but that part comes later.
Anyway, tropical getaway, free room and board for two weeks, blah blah blah, it's perfect, Kuwabara pretty much thought the same and he agreed to come with me. So did Kurama, and when Kurama does something you can bet your sack he'll somehow get Hiei in on it, too, which of course he did. I didn't ask how; Kurama just got smugly-smirky and Hiei looked super pissed when Kuwabara made a big deal over the shrimp tagging along, so I assume Kurama had embarrassed or tricked Hiei into the shebang or something. Getting a sword through my gut wasn't worth finding out which.
The first thing that should have tipped me off that this wasn't going to be a 'small' mission at all was when I asked if I could bring Keiko along and Koenma said "Absolutely not" with his most hideous "Oh my god we're all doomed" face. I wanted to bring her because I figured I could convince the guys to not say anything and make Keiko believe I was paying for the whole trip. She's always asking to go on trips so I was sure something this extravagant would get her to shut up for at least a month, but nothin' doin'—Koenma said no and I didn't push it.
Maybe I should have. Maybe, if I had, I wouldn't have gotten into the whole damn mess in the first place.
Getting Hiei on a plane was a bit of a nightmare (he didn't like leaving his sword in Kurama's luggage, he pitched a wild fit when his ears started popping during the ascent, the peanuts were way too salty, all that shit) but he calmed down once he got his binky—I mean, his sword back and could, in his own words, "breathe without that filthy human stink clogging up my nostrils." Kurama told him to calm the fuck down (in a more Kurama way) and we took the shuttle to our hotel without further trouble, apart from Kuwabara having to find a payphone to call his sister and his stupid cat to tell them he touched down safely. I called Keiko while we were at it; she was busy so I just left a message, and that was OK with me because I didn't want to trip myself up by saying how pretty the beaches were.
When I'd found out Keiko couldn't come with us, I'd decided that she didn't need to know I was on a half vacation. My story was that this was all a favor to Koenma in a horrible bumfuck part of the world. Siberia, probably. I let her fill in the blanks.
For the next two days the four of us just goofed off. Our resort was seaside and had, like, a billion pools and then the beach itself was awesome and there was a free spa and all the food you could ever want, so we pigged out and I got a wicked sunburn when I fell asleep on the beach but luckily Kurama had some sort of plant thing that took care of it in time for me n' Kuwabara to drag Hiei to a club and get him super fucking plastered. Kurama had to take care of Shorty's hangover the next morning, too, but he had a plant for that so it was all cool even though Hiei tried to kill me the next day. Kurama patched up those wounds with yet another leafy thing. We hadn't even started our mission but he was busier than I think he'd been in months.
Speaking of Kurama and plants, you could tell he loved being on this trip. We'd traveled to a small tropical country in the South Pacific, I'd never heard of it, but Kurama kept disappearing into the jungles around our hotel and coming back with the weirdest plants. Most of the country was a nature preserve, I think, and no one was allowed to go into the jungles without the permission of the government, but Kurama hardly seemed to care when he would shrink the plants back into their seed forms and tuck them into his hair for safekeeping. He kept gushing about how much he looked forward to growing all these rare species in his greenhouse back home (though if by 'home' he meant his house in Human World or his bachelor-crash-pad in Demon World I can't say) and when he ran out of plants to talk about he'd just vanish into the jungle again and come back with a ba-zillion more. He's really easy to please, that guy, though his hair-care regimen seems a little seedy.
On the third morning at the hotel, we woke up to find a letter on our suite's dining table. In it were instructions from Koenma (not that they actually told us all that much) and bright and early the next morning we followed his instructions to the letter: We dressed in light, durable clothes, packed stuff for a few days of roughing it in the jungle, and took a cab to the airport. A helicopter took us out to the middle of the jungle, where we basically jumped out before it even hit the ground and then watched it fly off again. According to the shit in the envelope, we were to poke around the jungle to look for "strange activity", take care of whatever it was when (or if) we found it, and then come back to the drop-off point at noon three days later so we could enjoy the rest of our vacation.
It seemed straightforward enough... or, it would've seemed straight forward enough had the dude piloting the 'copter not grabbed Kuwabara's hand right before he jumped ship and pressed a string of prayer beads into it. Then he'd said something in whatever language was native to this bit of the tropics and zoomed away like something was about to bite his ass off.
"Get yourself an admirer, buddy?" I teased as the whup-whup-whup of the heli got farther and farther away.
Kuwabara looked at the rosary with a mildly freaked-out expression. "Shut up. He was warnin' me about somethin', that's all." He looked to Kurama. "You don't happen to know what he was talking about, do you?"
"I can only assume it has to do with our mission," Kurama said evenly.
"Not that we even know what that is," I grumbled.
"Oh, I don't know about that," Kurama said. His eyes twinkled; he was gloating about something. "While walking in the jungle I overheard a group of poachers telling campfire stories. They seem quite convinced that this area of the jungle is inhabited by a monster who kills men for sport."
Kuwabara shivered. "Spooky."
"Isn't it obvious?" Hiei snapped. "A demon lives in these woods."
"How do you figure?" I asked.
Hiei looked like he was ready to cut my head off for being stupid—meaning, he looked pretty normal. "We're here on a mission," Hiei sneered. "Koenma knows about the demon and he's sent us to kill it. A child could have figured that out."
It seemed like a likely enough story. Kurama more or less agreed with Hiei a second later, and that was enough for me and Kuwabara to go along with it, too, though not before he asked Hiei if the shrimp himself was the child he'd mentioned. The results were not pretty.
I hated that jungle so much it hurt, mostly because it did hurt—it was like every fucking tree had leaves with knives on the tips, every vine was as big around as my wrist and was seriously set on strangling me, even the trees' fucking roots were out to get us! The goddamn mosquitoes, too, holy fuck, they were the size of birds and if you slapped one you got a palm full of blood for your trouble. I kept wiping their guts on Kuwabara's back, and when he threatened to punch me in the face I smeared some in Hiei's hair.
It took Kurama a while to get us all calm again, and he only succeeded because he promised he'd use his freaky flower-powers to get the foliage under control. Hiei zoomed off into the canopy above us to be alone (but not after lighting my pants on fire, the little fucker) and Kuwabara and I both had machetes to get through the brush with, but the way was still hard going even with Kurama at our backs. He tried to bend the plants out of our way as we walked, but he kept getting distracted by studying them and did a kind of crappy job, if you ask me.
We walked all day the first day, and when we stopped I felt like I was about to keel over dead. Kurama somehow made a shower of dead sticks come falling out of the trees; Hiei heaped them up and lit them on fire, and I cooked us dinner.
"What, you don't like the food?" I asked when I noticed that Kuwabara wasn't eating his share of Jungle Stew. It was actually pretty good, if I do say so myself. I'd packed dehydrated meat and Kurama found a bunch of forest-y herbs that made it almost taste like something you'd want to get back home.
Kuwabara jumped a little, sloshing stew out of his tin bowl and right onto his crotch. It was hot, so of course he let out a yelp and started jumping around to—I don't really know what he was trying to do, but I laughed anyway until he sat down and grumpily ladled himself more stew.
"Food's fine," he grumbled. "I just don't like this jungle, that's all."
"Yes, I'm sure it's not nearly as nice as your cozy little bed back home," Hiei said, tone dry. He was sitting outside the light of the fire, back against the trunk of a tree. He had his sword in his arms like a teddy bear.
Kurama tensed, probably expecting another fight to break out, but Kuwabara surprised us all.
"It's not that," he said without a trace of irritation. He stared moodily into the fire, and then he peered over his shoulder with a gulp. "I just really, really don't like this place."
No one said anything. Kuwabara hunched into himself, arms around his knees.
"It feels like the trees are… I don't know, alive or something," he said quietly. "Like they're watching me."
"They are alive, in both literal and figurative senses," said Kurama. He stared fondly into the canopy overhead. "Aside from being biologically living, the trees here are very old. After so many years, they have come to possess limited consciousnesses. They can even speak to one another. One can eavesdrop if one knows how to listen."
"And I'm assuming you do," Hiei stated.
Kurama just smiled.
"They sayin' anything good?" I asked.
"Not at the moment. The forest is asleep. We probably should be, too."
Kuwabara shook his head. "Not me. There's no way I could sleep in a place like this."
Because he wasn't going to go to sleep anyway, Kuwabara agreed to take the first watch. When Kurama woke me up later to take my turn, Kuwabara had finally drifted off, but his face kept twisting like he was having a bad dream.
The next day was basically a lather-rinse-repeat of the first, at least during the morning. We ate a breakfast of granola bars and what was left over from the stew and got started walking. Kurama was in charge of the maps, but he still managed to use his flower-powers to clear the vines and plants for us, with better results than the day before. I guess the novelty of all the pretty flowers had worn off; we'd been practically buried in them for a day, after all. Anyway, Kuwabara was better than me at using the machete to clear brush since he was a sword-guy and had had practice, and Hiei could burn, slash, or just circus-monkey-jump his way around obstacles if he wanted, so I was basically dead weight until lunch, when I used what felt like my only useful talent in this stupid jungle and cooked us something to eat.
Kuwabara looked haggard as we ate. Kurama asked him if he was OK, and if he had gotten enough sleep the night before.
"Not really," the psychic grunted around a mouthful. "Nightmares."
"Oh?"
"Yeah."
"…details, perhaps?"
Kuwabara put down his plate, scowling. "I didn't want to talk about it, but since you asked—I just saw a bunch of people dying. Screams, blood, stuff like that." He picked his plate back up. "Didn't see who killed 'em, dunno who died, just saw blood and screams and death. Leave it alone."
"There is no need to get defensive, Kuwa—"
"Drop it, Kurama."
When we got moving again, Kurama murmured in my ear: "There is more to Kuwabara's nightmare than he is letting on."
I stared at Kuwabara's back as he swung his machete at a particularly annoying vine.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, there is."
We were making good time and getting used to the jungle, and just when I was getting bored and getting pretty good at using my machete Kuwabara stopped walking. I ran into him and cursed, but he just stared off to the right, frozen, eyes locked on the trees like he was trying to see something far away.
"Watch it, buddy," I snapped.
He jolted like I'd woken him up or something and said: "What?"
"I said, you're in my way!"
His blank look turned into a scowl. "Shut it, Urameshi."
I tried to lighten the mood by taunting Kuwabara into some good-natured bickering, but he wasn't having any of it. He kept looking off into the woods; he did it so much that he kept running into jungley bits.
"No, don't help me," he snapped when Kurama offered to clear more plants especially for him. "I'm fine. Just spooked."
Kurama shrugged. "Suit yourself. I need to conserve my energy, anyway."
The plants in front of me ceased to clear out of the way and started doubling their efforts in front of Kurama. I lamented the loss of the flower powers by punching Kuwabara's arm. "Good going, asshole!"
In the canopy, Hiei let out a harsh laugh, and we started back up with the hiking. Stupid hiking.
So the plants were magically getting out of Kurama's way and Hiei was busy venting his frustrations on the treetops and I was whacking at shit with my machete when Kuwabara stopped walking. Again.
"You need to take a dump or something?" I snapped, but rather than answer he just turned off the path and plunged into the jungle. I leapt after him, yelling for him to get his ass back where we could see it, but he shouted at me to piss off.
"Something is over here!" he yelled, voice getting farther away every second. He must've been running.
I looked at Kurama. The red-head shrugged. Hiei sighed. Together, the three of us went after Kuwabara.
We caught up with him a few minutes later; Hiei stood off to one side while Kuwabara tried to climb over a boulder sandwiched between two massive trees. When we got to the scene, Hiei turned to Kurama.
"Smell that?" he said.
Kurama took a deep breath, brow furrowing—and then his eyes opened wide.
"Blood," Hiei said.
It took an hour, but we made it to wherever it was Kuwabara had been leading us. It was a camp of some kind, with ten or so straw-roofed huts filling up a clearing at the base of a rocky cliff. I took note of the way a waterfall spilled over the cliff and formed a stream that wandered off into the jungle. The people in the camp probably used it as their water source.
Not that they'd be needing it anymore, since they were all dead and stuff.
I know bodies when I see 'em; hell, I've made enough of them myself to know what they look like, and these guys were as dead as all get-out. Kurama muttered something about how they were guerrilla soldiers, probably part of some local gunrunner gang or drug cartel, but I couldn't listen to him because I was distracted by just how many of the dozens of bodies were little more than kids—kids with AK 47s and grenades on their belts, but kids nonetheless. The youngest couldn't have been older than twelve, but the oldest was an old man with white hair. He looked like the ringleader. He was missing his body below his ribs.
Hiei took one look at the mess and flitted away in a flash of black. I saw him reappear on top of one of the huts, look around with blade-sharp eyes, and flit away again.
The rest of us just stared at the dead. It took a minute to be able to look away, and when I did, I saw that Kuwabara was sweating real bad and that his hands were shaking at his side. He'd dropped his machete. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a light squeeze.
"I take it you've seen these guys before?" I asked, acting on a hunch.
He nodded. His voice sounded choked. "This was all in my dream. Only with more screaming. And people who were still alive."
"Shit." I looked to Kurama. "Any idea what could've done this?"
The demon slowly picked his way across the clearing and knelt beside the white-haired guy with no hips or legs or whatever. He studied the corpse for a minute. Then he looked up at us. His face looked like a mask—a calm one, but I could see something brewing underneath.
"These wounds have been partially cauterized," he said, all clinical and detached. "Whatever blew him apart did so with great force and heat, heat enough to melt bone and sear flesh."
"… like a rocket launcher, maybe?"
"This is much more precise than any human weaponry I am familiar with."
I sucked in a breath. "A demon, then?"
"No. This was caused by a weapon, not an energy based attack."
"… the hell!"
While Kurama started yakking about radiant energy and particles of what-the-hell-ever kind, Kuwabara looked up at the top of the waterfall and stared at it. He jumped when Hiei appeared in front of us, out of nowhere, and gave us a beady little glare that set my teeth on edge.
"There are no survivors," he said, "but I did find this."
His arm had been at his side, the thing in his hand hidden by the trail of his cloak. His hand moved, flickered, and then something sailed through the air to land on the ground with a meaty thud. The thing rolled, quivering, right onto my shoes.
Kuwabara: "What is that thing?"
"Demon, duh," I said. I kicked the head—because that's what it was, a severed head that sort of looked like a dog had gotten freaky with a purple octopus—off of my feet. Its tongue lolled from a long mouth, colored black and dripping off-white saliva. Its teeth were as long as my hand, I kid you fucking not.
Kurama knelt and peeled back the creature's eyelid with a fingertip. Steel blue with a vertical orange pupil. What the…
"It is unlike any demon I have ever encountered," Kurama said. He didn't looked worried, not exactly, but his shoulders were tight.
"Likewise," said Hiei.
Kurama continued his investigation. I tried not to inhale; the head stank like a pile of shit at high noon and holy crap, my shoes going to be so fucked after all of this. I looked down at my laces. They were flecked with aquamarine goop, goop that matched the stuff covering the head's ragged stump of a place where a neck used to be. More goop leaked out of holes on either side of its oblong skull—ear holes, I guessed, ringed with a fringe of little purple feelers. The skin of its face was lumpy and slick-looking. Keiko would have probably suggested it get a facial.
I felt Kuwabara moving, so I looked at him. He had moved a little closer to the severed head, and then he backed off sharply and wheeled around to look at the bodies. His eyes darted to the top of the waterfall, narrowed, and then shifted down to the bodies again. He looked back to the creature to ask: "Do you think this thing killed these people?"
I had no clue so I didn't say anything. Kurama glanced at Kuwabara but didn't speak. Hiei just stared at the head like it owed him money.
"Guys, seriously—is this the demon Koenma wanted us to kill?" Kuwabara pressed. A hand went up to tangle in his carroty hair. "I'd feel better knowing that the monster that did this got blown to bits."
I saw Kurama swallow and knew that he had something. "Kurama," I said. "Spill."
The fox demon pursed his lips in a really good impression of every disapproving teacher I had ever had. "Judging from the angle of the neck and the shape of the skull, I would hazard a guess that this creature is a quadruped."
"Say what?"
"It runs on all fours."
"Oh."
"This means that carrying a weapon would be all but impossible," said Kurama. He hooked a finger under the creature's lip and pulled the flesh back. "The teeth and claws are its most likely means of defense, and I see no indication that this creature possesses any of the necessary means of inflicting the wounds we earlier observed on the solderis' bodies." He let go of the lip. It flopped onto the huge teeth with a smack.
I said: "So this thing didn't kill these people?"
Said Kurama: "I'm afraid not."
"Well if it didn't, then what did?" I asked.
Kurama said nothing as he stared at the severed head. Hiei looked off into the trees, then cursed and swatted at a buzzing fly. Flies drifted off the bodies in black waves, investigating us newcomers like we were the fresh dessert after their main course of massacre.
Kuwabara turned, movements jerky, and looked back toward the dead camp. "The real monster is still out there," he said. His hands came up to grab his biceps; was he cold? "And guys, I don't mean to incite a panic or nothin', but I've been getting the tickle feeling for hours now!"
I knew what Kuwabara's tickle feeling meant just as well as the other guys. I squared my feet and balled my hands into hard fists, keeping an eye on the treeline as Kuwabara watched the camp. Kurama stood, hand creeping up into his hair, eyes travelling over everything like he was playing "Where's Waldo?" and Waldo was being a tricky jerk.
Hiei shut his eyes and ripped off the bandana covering the Jagan. The eye flared open with a spark of black light and purple iris. For a second the demon just stood there, searching, but then his red eyes opened.
"It's near," he said. "I can sense something."
"Demon?" Kurama asked.
"Not remotely," Hiei said. His eyes narrowed, tone dropping into harsh disbelief. "It's like nothing I've ever felt before, but it's strong. That much I can tell. The drive of the warrior is coming off of it in waves." His eyes narrowed further. "It's watching us."
"Does it mean to kill us, Hiei?" Kurama asked. He sounded as delicate as a ballerina made of knives.
Hiei's smirk could kill a puppy at twenty paces. "It won't get close enough to try," he said—and that's when Hiei doomed us all by being a stupid douchebag and pulling out his security blanket… I mean, his sword. Whatever. Point is, he pulled it out of its sheath and moved into a fighting stance, and when he did Kuwabara let out a cry and clutched his head. We all looked at him, morbidly, stupidly curious.
"Holy crap," Kuwabara said. His hands all but yanked at his hair. "Holy crap, something just changed, what—" He looked at us. "Guys, guys, the thing watching us is—" Beady black eyes opened as wide as an anime character's. "Hiei, MOVE!"
"What in the world are you—" Hiei spat, and that's when we all saw the three beads of bright red light, arranged like a triangle and pulsing in a way that was anything but friendly, trained right on Hiei's chest.