Disclaimer: I do not own YYH.

The Art of Losing a Fox

1. This is how it doesn't start

It was raining that night, but even as the shards fell from the sky in angry marches I could see your solemn green eyes. Even if the foliage stood between us, you were looking straight at me like I was never trying to hide. It was then that I knew I was both right and first. It was you indeed, the one I had read in the legends, and nobody has ever broken your secret.

Nobody until now.

I put on my usual show: lots of anger and violence, to test you, never mind if you were still a child in your human state, and curiously as you avoided my attacks and replaced puddles of water with pools of your blood, your eyes still seemed to dance.

I carried your young, frail body, left you in the nest of that which you have adopted as your mother, and in the dark laughed at the innocence of your boyish frame sleeping soundly as I healed the gashes that were my own doing.

Years later, always with a sparkle in your eyes, you would constantly tell them this was how we first met: me trying to kill you in a rampage. But to me, this will always be the only moment when I was able to save you.

2. This is how it doesn't start

The taste of your seed was nothing special. It was neither sweet nor had it any special tinge of anything fruity, woody, flowery or any of those shonen-ai pocketbooks (boy, you collected a lot of those) characters proclaimed after they gave someone head. In fact, the human flavor it contained was too salty for my personal preference. Perhaps because, although the soul was centuries old, your human body was just fourteen years of age, hence it hasn't developed into the adult potential yet?

Curiously when I felt the thick liquid rush into my mouth, along with the softest yet most carnal sigh, I found it… interesting. In our own languid states looking at the glowing stick-on star things of your ceiling, I figured that the youthful, there-but-not-quite-there tang could be something that would grow on me.

I wanted your body, wanted it treacherously since the first day we met, and finally after the precarious state of your youth you had given it to me. You timed it perfectly, careful to let past the years when what we've done would have counted as poisoning your innocence, even if it was just a painted one. I wondered too, why I've let you, when I shouldn't care anyway.

Shouldn't.

I shouldn't care.

3. It may have started here

"Why do I get the feeling you're keeping something from me?"

You didn't look up, and actually in a few days I would learn it was because you were scared of my question's little truth.

"How awful of you to assume things about me after we've spent sleepless nights perfecting this plan," you said instead, betraying honesty quite expertly and continuing to browse through a book as you sat below a tree that I, in my years of shadowing you, have learned to claim as my own. I was, in all aspects of shying away from self-deprecation, proud of myself that you seem to have found comfort in something I have chosen.

"I'm not assuming. I'm asking you."

Your exasperated sigh, as if trying to shoo the fly of a question away, should have been clear to me. But at that time I didn't know you enough after all, regrettably.

"All you have to do is trust me," you said with a softer voice. "I'll get us those treasures."

"Tsk. I have no doubt about that. It's what you're going to do after I'm worried about."

"I won't stop you," you said, flipping another page. But why was your face looking straight forward to the sunrise creeping up on our limited time?

"You may do anything you please with your sword. But all I ask is you won't stop me or what I do with the mirror either."

A pause. And then in an instant you leapt up to my branch, balanced to sit with legs dangling on either side so you were directly in front of my miserable figure. Your hands sought to cover my glowing forehead with your ink-stained palm.

"Please don't," you said with a sad smile. Reluctantly I closed the third eye I had just opened, meant to search your complicated mind. I doubt, with the labyrinths of personas you're always creating, I would have found anything anyway.

4. It may have started here

More than a few months later we found ourselves left in a hotel room, awkwardly, much like a pair of boots that didn't quite fit. It was a couple more hours before the last fight of the Dark Tournament, and the rest of the team had gone off to spend what could be their last moments with their loved ones.

The tension between us, occupying a space of its own on the cheap canvas couch, was unspeakable. We were not left with each other by choice, after all, but by the fact that we had no one else to share precious breaths with.

"How's your arm?" you whispered delicately, as if the silence was a clear crystal glass you were afraid to break. We had kept it up for years, just right after we've both realized that your betrayal by siding with the detective was something I could not easily forgive.

My reply was as reluctant as it was abashedly hopeful. "It will heal in time."

The wind displacing beside me, your now fully-grown body in front of me, your delicate hands touching my hiddenly ravaged arm and pushing healing ki onto it. It was all surreal and too sudden, and your touch, god, your touch, dragged me back once again, back in the darkness of that warehouse, across your pallid face and wide green eyes as I felt my blade push into your human flesh.

"Please don't," I find myself whispering hoarsely.

I don't know why it wouldn't go away.

It was easier when you were young. Small hands, small feet, small hips, small world, and we were nothing but playmates in your action figure-littered room. Only, we've abandoned the useless plastic toys; it was there for farce anyway, and we've ploughed much of our attention more towards each other as I knelt, tucked your short red hair behind your ear and unbuttoned your school shirt. You were my fox, after all, and I was first.

I would be foolish to think you were innocent then; I'll always recall you saying that you had the same consciousness as youko even as you were born as a human. But it was more uncomplicated to fool myself then. Now, when I look at you, wild one…

"Leave!" I spat out loud, unable to think of anything else to address the growing bubble in my chest.

Your wide green eyes. They looked at me strangely, with compassion and guilt and anger and confusion, as you gently lifted your hand up from my bandaged arm and backed away.

5. This is how it almost ends

Your flying body. Your closed eyes. Bomb-imploded wounds that cut across the strong frame that I tended to for years, from youth to a little before now.

One of the many moments that I found myself helpless once again, unable to save you.

6. This is how it starts

Peace was a feeling I almost forgot since the Makai Tournament, but simply being in the same world as you reminded me of it, like a distant feeling of a child's hand on my face. I turn my head to look at you, and from your profile nobody would have guessed those years of fighting to save this world. Your hair drifted along with the wind as we stood side by side at the roof of Genkai's temple; thank god for Yukina giving birth, otherwise I would have found no other reason to come back.

We've only stood there for a few minutes, but it was strange how every second felt like I was looking at you for the first time. I was conscious of every part of you, taking your presence all in, and for a couple of moments I couldn't even remember when we first met. It was then that I realized that I've forgiven you, that I missed you terribly, and suddenly I was desperate to get you back.

"Hardly anything has changed in Ningenkai," I began.

"Agree," you said with a smile, taking a deep breath. "That's good though. It's nice to still have things to go back to."

I grinned. "How are you?"

"Stressed. Being a human and working like one is much harder than I thought."

"You can always go back to Makai. It's much more organized now," I say a little too flatly as I tried to keep the optimism from my tone. "Enma has assigned quite a good patrol unit. You're free to join."

"I know, and maybe I will, someday. But it's all good right now. I kind of like the challenge. And I have someone to cheer me up."

"Yusuke? I'm surprised his antics still work on you."

"Oh it does! But I also… met someone. You know the drill. Lover. Boyfriend. Whatever. Sometimes we're such a couple, I can't stand it."

But your eyes were smiling.

7. This is where it starts

There are mechanics to drunk portal traveling; that is, crossing over by finding the exact spot a certain someone came in, regardless of the fact that certain someone had drunk 15 glasses of god knows what in the celebration at Genkai's. It's pretty simple, see: you just had to walk inch by inch until you find a slight tug at your waist, and then jump right ahead. The quicker you jump, the less chances you'll miss the spot, and that was the plan.

It's a chilly evening, and I had been walking and jumping in the park for quite a while, frustrated. "Fucking portal," I slurred, stumbling down and burying my butt in the snow. "It was exactly here," I whined to nobody in particular. In my mind I whined at you, but then I remembered you were knocked out cold on the floor in the temple when we left you, even more drunk than I was.

Or perhaps I remembered wrong, because the way you said "Maybe it's here," sounded so near. Near, like standing beside the tree across me. Near, like walking towards me and pausing. Near, like beside me, reaching your hand out and saying something like "You'll catch a cold".

I said no but let you pull me up, the way drunk demons say something and do something else instead.

I realized you had pulled me in closer too, a few seconds after I was already there. But I leaned in with a drunken stupor that was a little too honest.

I think I may have said "We shouldn't" right after I realized that though you were awake, you were still a lot more drunk than I was. You crashed your lips into mine, and soon I was kissing you back, the way drunk demons say something and do something else instead.

The morning after, draped in snow and nothing more, I would, for the rest of my existence, remember the shocked look in your eyes, the sting of your slap on my face, and the defiant way you pulled out your phone from the puddle of clothes and whispered, "Love? Sorry I missed your calls."

8. This is where it starts

We did not talk about it in the next few days, but actually, the days, the weeks, the months following felt a whole lot like an extension of the morning after when you walked away scathingly mad. It would seem like phrases we have said to each other in different phases of our lives would sum up the truth your back said to me: Please don't, leave, we shouldn't.

But then again.

But then again we could – what else were portal cross-overs, cherry trees and windows for anyway?

The way you screamed in pleasure told me that you thought the same, and as for me, I got what I always wanted. We were inside your room again, playing, and as you slept on my chest I still looked at the stick-on star things above us. I wondered why you never removed those.

I would put my arms around you possessively. I'd save you from this, I promised myself. I would save you from this world.

9. This is how it ends

Sometime in the Ningenkai summer, when I was resting on your window and you were just sitting there unsure, you hinted at a problem with your lover that probably involved an affair. I hopped down from the my perch quickly, half-baffled and half-disgusted that you couldn't tell me straightforwardly what it really was – he found out and we must stop.

"What exactly do you mean," I manage to say with a steady voice, although inside I was boiling in anger. I wasn't about to stand there and let you talk me into circles again. If I was going to lose you once and for all, I'd rather we be adults about it and forget all the lying.

"I think," you start slowly, looking sideways. "I think I'm leaving him and going back to Makai."

I may have held my breath – a second, or two, or maybe longer since I felt myself getting slightly dizzy.

"So he found out and he's breaking up with you."

A pause. You look at me, finally, eyes dancing like they used to. "What part of me leaving him and going with you is not clear?"

10. The art of losing a fox

There was no violent confrontation unlike I had expected. Yusuke looked at me squarely and this was something I knew punching the lights out of each other won't fix. The rest of the gang hugged you goodbye but eyed me strangely, like I was some kind of animal. I didn't say anything – not in defense of you or me or us or this… you were choosing to leave and go with me, and I had again, as was my position all too often, set myself on speaking only when spoken to.

Finally, just before crossing over, he did. The detective only asked me how it happened, and I felt myself grinning as I explained a delicate process to him: the art of keeping a fox was the same as the art of losing him countless times, but trying, nevertheless, again and again.

Author's Note: Inspiration taken from Kate Pedroso's The Art of Fleshing Out Rumors. If you like it, make us happy by clicking that "review" button below.

Update: This has a sequel called The Art of Making Choices. Please see my profile and look for the story there.