A/N: Written for the Green Room (Rlt), Challenge #3 – write about some sort of hypnosis, and for the Diversity Writing Challenge (DMWA), d82 – write a crossover.
Eyes that See, Eyes that Tell
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Neither of them loved the world. Nor pitied it. The difference was that Saiou had a sister and she was in the world he despised: the almost indistinguishable glitter in muck that Rei lacked.
If it mattered, she would turn her nose from it, but it didn't. For all the strength and power of his foresight, his mind was easy prey.
She sought him and he became a wolf of hers without a fuss.
.
Sometimes, the sheep were problematic. They argued. They made her poor wolves cry all over again. She was angry with both of them in times like that. The sheep for creating such situations. The wolves for falling for it again.
She told them. Innumerable times she told them they were liars but they preferred to listen to their family, their friends, their so-called loved ones. They preferred to be betrayed.
Her legs were pencils on a wheelchair and it didn't matter that she could in fact walk, that the paraplegia was also a lie, because she couldn't once upon a time and lies and her loved ones were the reason why.
But if they didn't understand when she told them, then she would simply have to break their hearts again.
And the sheep as well.
But that was always the more complicated endgame. Even though she always won.
.
He was a useful wolf. Especially in the complicated end games. He was quick at grasping people. At understanding. At working out exactly which phrase would be so hurtful, so natural- something that would slip out of their tongues without their knowing until it was too late for them to take it back. She could of course go directly, let her own voice be the one to awaken the wolf inside – but it was far more satisfying, and meaningful, and false love, unravelling lies, become their undoing.
And she didn't even need to watch it happen. It could move without her. Spiral, like a rippling wave readying itself to cripple the world.
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He wanted to cripple the world too. In his own way. He thought he was a sheep – a glowing, golden sheep – the darkness was the light. She was the light as well. She blared the evil of the world on the sheep she caught before splattering their blood on the world. She did it from her wheelchair. He did it from a table with a white cloth and a deck of tarot cards.
His fortunes were always interesting to listen to. He knew when someone was coming who she needed to be a little wearier with. She knew when new wolves were coming. She knew when it was time to abandon a wolf, when it was time to clean up the little mess left behind and move on.
And what did she give in return? She was a wolf – but she was the master of wolves and he the underling so she owed him nothing, really.
But she gave it anyway, what every wolf had come to her for: advice.
Destroy the world.
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He sought a key, and an enemy. He could tell a lot about a person once he found them but to find them, sometimes, was a struggle. And the enemy eluded him. Their paths had not yet crossed and though he knew fate would eventually bring their threads together, he was impatient. He wanted to know.
She could not tell the future and so could not help in that regard, but she had resources aplenty. They met more and more people every day. Sometimes they became wolves for her. Often, they were sheep of whom she later disposed. He stayed close to her because his cards had to this fateful meeting years ago, and thus something was to come of it. Perhaps that something was already achieved. Perhaps not. He saw, anyhow, all her newer sheep and wolves, and she never worried for treachery because she had every wolf of hers under her spell and he was no exception.
On his part, he was aware of the devil's contract he'd signed when he sought her out. But that was fine. He was a vessel anyhow: a vessel for the light he held within, and she protected and nurtured that light unwittingly. It didn't matter if his body was a puppet to her beck and call – the light was not, could not be, and in the end he was a slave to both but to the light foremost.
She, perhaps, was not aware of that.
For the moment, it didn't matter.
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She found an interesting sheep, and as a result she lost a wolf. She was a minor loss. Not very valuable. Not with powers like Saiou – and Saiou had chosen the perfect line again. She giggled in the apartment complex, in her wheelchair because she was so used to it by now. 'For the one I love,' she repeated, then laughed again. Lovely, truly lovely, and ironic as well.
Her parents had tried to kill her for that after all, amidst all the disbelief around them.
They'd all thought her hypnosis was an artefact, was a lie.
She used it to pick apart all their lies and watch them all crumble and become either wolves or die.
.
'The world hates us.' She watched the news. He watched as well. They spoke of hypnotists. Of fortune tellers. Not of the two of them, but nonetheless of people in their craft.
It was a lesson she found herself having to repeat oh so many times. At least once to every wolf. Sometimes more, especially when her hypnosis began to weak at the edges because her wolves were too soft. But better that than all of them hard teeth and bones. That was such a messy business. No fun. Hence why she barely stayed to watch the blood baths when things happened that way.
She wasn't a sadist. Just a girl who had to cleanse the world because it was such a dirty place, because it betrayed her.
And he wanted to destroy the world because it was a dark place, and that was more or less the same.
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She found the enemy for him, in the end. His name was Yuki Juudai. 'A sunny sheep,' she commented. 'Disappointing. I'd hoped your fated enemy would be one of my wolves as well.' But fate made that move impossible.
And perhaps it was always impossible, she mused, and he mused as well. Two wolves under the same mistress would be ill pressed to remain enemies, and yet enemies they must be in this case. Mortal enemies: the light and the dark. He will cleanse, and this Yuki Juudai will be the herald of the darkness, fighting to keep the world in its current cruel and chaotic state.
But then Saiou meets the boy himself and agrees: he is a sunny boy. Hopeful to the point of foolishness. Never without a grin on his face. It is ironic that such a boy would be the herald of darkness, and yet darkness he is. No other eye would have seen it but his. Even Rei had not, until he'd picked it out of her encounter with him.
She laughed and claimed humans were never nice enough to wear the truth on their sleeves. 'Devil's children,' said, 'these sheep.'
And he agreed.
Beneath the sunny disposition of Yuki Juudai was a devil spawn – and a big one, for it had to be to claim the name of darkness' herald.
.
And so another game of Rabbit Doubt began. She gave the boy called Yuki Juudai a little rabbit to hang on his phone and he foolishly did, and then she worked to break him. That proved to be more difficult because they were on an island almost all year round and she'd gathered that even in the summer, he didn't move. Nothing awaited him at home except parents at work for long hours and he'd be asleep when he returned. So he simply didn't go, and they kept all their correspondence to phones.
It angered her, for a moment, to think some parents and children had such flimsy relationships with each other. But then her parents had tried to kill her and died themselves, and many of her wolves had similar tales. Saiou's parents had abandoned his sister and him to the streets, and ultimately to her.
What was there to be angry about? What parents and children did with each other had no business in her grand scheme in any case.
But them being on an island made it hard to whisk five people into a mortal game without alerting the others. Or, at least, the normal sorts of games.
The island came with its own death tickets after all.
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Duelling. She saw it as only one of many tools but for him it was the tool. He suggested it. She took up the offer and the secondary one as well, because he was a wolf of hers and anything he did could only be to her irrelevance or benefit.
'He will become a wolf of yours after all,' he said to her. 'When you outmanoeuvre him on this stage.'
She outmanoeuvred him indeed.
But to her surprise and displeasure he stayed a sheep and slipped from her grasp like a stranded fish who'd stumbled across the ocrean.