Sorry about the spelling the first time. It always was my worst subject. I'll put up a couple more chapters soon. They're already written. I just have to go back and edit them. Please review.
Disclaimer: I do not own Yu Yu Hakusho or Mitarai. Graffiti is O.C.
Blood and Water
Part one: Graffiti
"Salutations! I come from elsewhere. Let's go with Tokyo. Lots of people are from there. I'd say it's nice to meet you all, but from the way you're staring, I doubt it. Geez, it's bright in here. Mind if I close the blinds? This class is infested with sunlight."The new student abruptly stopped her self-introduction to the class and started closing blinds. A few gossipy girls in the back started snickering and pointing. It quickly spread.
Mitarai apprehensively watched the wave of scorn spread across his class. She probably gave the worst self-introduction ever. She didn't even say her name, and this class was judgmental, to put it nicely. He sighed. It would be another month before his transfer went through. He listened with one ear as words like "freak", "loser" and even "slut" grew louder in the constant whispers. "Where did "slut" come from?" he thought. She just got here, and there was nothing remotely sexual about her. Mitarai only guessed she was female by her uniform.
She had a very small frame with a slight, maybe even a flat, figure. It was hard to tell under the rumpled untucked shirt and baggy black jacket. The pleated skirt that was supposed to be mid-thigh length came to her knees. She wore one green and one orange sock with a pair of sneakers covered in duck tape. Her hair was blue, orange, black, green and white blonde in random patches. Other than her indecisive dye job, she did nothing with hair or makeup. Her possibly straight hair hung to her shoulders in a matted mess. Mitarai wondered if she owned a mirror or a comb. He felt a terrible dread for her as she fiddled meticulously with a jammed blind string.
"You don't want to introduce yourself?" The teacher finally prompted. He leaned up against the wall in a pose that was almost casual with a long haircut that was almost trendy. He smiled smugly at the small living mess. "For there to be winners, there must also be losers." He thought. It was his favorite phase, and he said it at least once a week.
She finished closing every blind to every window along the wall. At this point, Mitarai was the only one who didn't watch her with arrogant and scheming eyes. He kept his eyes on his homework and tried to mind his own business. She liked the feel of that and took the desk behind him.
"Oh!" She suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be introducing herself. "I hear all those nasty names you're calling me, you stupid brats. Let me give you one to start with." She struck a pose like a disco queen. "Call me Graffiti. That's not what it says in the role book, but both Graffiti and the role book are false names. It's all the same. Call me whatever you will."
She collapsed limply into her new chair and smiled apathetically. Intense anger burned deep in her eyes despite her smiling mouth. Mitarai's stomach clenched. He had spent years pressing hate beneath a calm surface just like that.
"Who are you calling brats, little miss freak?" A boy's voice called from the far corner.
"Stupid brats" She corrected and made a sweeping gesture to encompass the whole class. Cold and hateful glares surrounded her, and she smiled deeper and drank it in.
"Oh, that's bad. This is really bad!" Mitarai thought.
"Don't" He whispered back to her. "They'll hurt you."
She glanced in his direction and kept on smiling. "Cool deal"
"Miss Graffiti, is it? Like the profanity punks scribble onto bathroom walls?" The teacher asked in a pleasant tone. The class laughed. He scratched out her name in his role book and wrote "Graffiti". A smirk slid up the left side of her face exposing one pointed eyetooth.
"I guess your name is in every bathroom stall in the country." That same boy smiled at her from the far corner. His uniform was worn and faded, and his short haircut was ragged, as if he'd done it himself. He shared a smile with the heavyset boy in the chair next to him. "I say she goes around writing her name and number in boys' bathrooms. You know, 'for a good time call . . .'"
"Who'd buy it from a runt like that? She could pass for a little boy." said a pretty girl with heavy rouge.
"Some perverts are into little boys." He argued back. "Isn't that right, Mitarai?" The scorn shifted its focus one desk over.
"Alright class, this isn't an appropriate school topic." The teacher playfully wagged a finger at them. "Turn to Chapter 3." The class fell into a temporary cease-fire, and a black mist that smelled like swamp-water oozed under the door.
Mitarai noticed it immediately. It had a strong spiritual pull that made it hard to look away. It roiled along the floor like a mass of snakes. The black fog covered the teacher's feet, and he kept on reading aloud. It only felt like a draft to him. It spread over the floor and started to deepen like a rising flood. Tendrils flipped out, and a couple girls shrieked as it licked their legs. One of the boys got slapped for it.
"What did I do?" he whined.
"Keep your hands to yourself!" she yelled.
"But it wasn't me this time, I swear!"
Even as he spoke, a girl in the front of the class started to panic. "I can't get up! Something's got my legs! HELP ME!"
As if that was the breaking point, the whole class broke into terrified conversation.
"I can't get up either."
"George, tell me that was you!"
"EEEK! STOP IT! STOP IT!"
"But there's nothing there!"
"What's going on here?" A tendril flipped the book from the teacher's hand, and he couldn't walk to retrieve it. His legs were bound by unseen twisting snakes.
"WHAT"S HAPPENING!?"
Mitarai had been quietly staring into the mist and was starting to feel sleepy. A slow, silent darkness pushed into his mind and pulled down his eyelids. The slight blonde had almost passed out onto his desk when a textbook whacked him on the head.
Graffiti stood on her desk with a 400 page history book in her hand. "Don't sleep. It's pulling you under."
He looked down at the black tendrils that bound his waist. The rest of him was covered by a highpoint in the living mist. It felt him start to struggle. It tightened and pulled him downward. Underneath his feet, the floor was gone.
"Aaaah! No! Please help me!" Mitarai grabbed onto the window sill as his desk and chair sank into the black fog. The block snakes only pulled harder and reached higher.
"They like you in particular, don't they?" Graffiti watched the black tendrils reach for her feet. Her desk began to sink. "Is 'unbindable' a word?" She wondered aloud amid her screaming classmates. "Oh well, we'll find out." She pulled a black marker out of her jacket pocket and wrote 'unbindable' on Mitarai's neck. The twisting snakes ripped him off the ledge and swallowed him.
Mitarai was struggling against the unknown black mist that pulled him down past where the classroom floor should have been. As he breathed its tainted air, his mind was plagued with terrible visions. Most were from the chapter black video. The same visions of war, pain and torture convinced him beyond all doubt to help Sensui destroy every human being. At the same time, he was being pulled in a black river current. He looked out across a vast network of red threads, and he sensed distant fingers pulling those strings. Then with the familiar rush of a psychic opening their territory, it was all gone. He stared at the classroom's florescent lights from the linoleum floor.
"I guess 'unbindable' is a word." Graffiti still stood on her desk, and from his angle on the floor he could see her pink cotton panties. He quickly sat up and hoped she didn't notice.
"You could see it right?" She calmly twirled a tangled green lock of hair.
Mitarai just looked at her nervously.
"If you could see the mist. Why didn't you get onto your desk? Or run?" She asked.
Mitarai was glad he held his tongue. "It . . .pulled at my mind." He couldn't think of a good comparison for it. "I couldn't look away, and it didn't even occur to me to move."
"Hmph, Interesting. Think that's what they got?" Graffiti casually pointed at their silent classmates. They were sprawled across the floor with their faces frozen in mid-scream.
"Are they dead?" Mitarai rushed to a boy's side and checked his wrist for a pulse. Relief washed over him as he felt a steady heartbeat. He was only frozen somehow.
"Awful compassionate toward those vultures." Graffiti said coolly as she wrote on her palm.
"Who are you?" Mitarai asked.
"Watch." She showed him her palm with 'unbindable' written across it. An orange glow surrounded her as it sank into her flesh. "Now it is part of me. I am 'unbindable'." She hopped down and thin trickles of the remaining mist dispersed at her feet like frightened worms. "My ki is too small for my ability though. When I use it on myself, it lasts for half an hour. You have twenty minutes."
A loud boom shook the room from the foundations. The lights flickered and went out.
"Coincidence?" She said with sweet sarcasm.
"I need to find water." Mitarai said. There was a home economics class at the end of the hall. It had sinks and knives.
"Water?" Graffiti's dark silhouette titled its head.
"I need it to use my power." Mitarai couldn't make out her Graffiti's face with only the weak light from the closed blinds. This girl psychic appeared exactly when the black mist did. That was a bit much for coincidence, but she had saved him. Why would a villain do that?
"If you need water, we should get moving." Graffiti's voice cut his line of thought. "By the silence, the whole school's out cold. And by that 'boom', the source of the mist is in the basement."
Mitarai listened to the silence and knew that she was right. He had never seen or heard of a mist like that. However, he doubted it was intelligent enough to retreat and move to plan 'b' on its own. He remembered the endless red lines pulled tight to a single point in the darkness. "A puppetmaster" He murmured to himself. He could just make out the forms of his frozen classmates on the dark floor. Their mouths were open in silent screams, and their teeth reflected brighter than the scattered paper.
"Get out of here." He said to Graffiti.
"Are you coming?" She asked.
"I'll be out soon." He said without looking at her.
"No" She replied. "You have eighteen minutes left. Where will you be when my power stops protecting you? And I like to hit back. I will fight this thing with or without you. So then, lead us to water."