A Mischievous Ghost

"That man…"

Senritsu was caught off guard by the sudden sound of Kurapika's voice from the Music room's doorway inside the Nostrade mansion. She was so surprised that her thin fingers slipped off of the piano keys and a loud distorted sound crushed through the room and made her twitch like a scared little deer.

"Huh? What do you mean, Kurapika?" Senritsu turned around to him, smiling softly.

She sat before the piano and she was honestly really surprised that Kurapika had come to her, because since the week before he seemed to avoid her like the devil avoided the holy water.

The young woman was far too friendly and gentle to offend him and ask what was wrong. So she just accepted his behavior–because she didn´t want him to be strained by her presence, though she was a little bit perplex about his strange behavior before herself.

"That man you told me about in York Shin, the guy who played the Sonata of Darkness… What was he like? Before he died?" Kurapika looked like a living ghost. He was as pale as paper, his eyes had dark circles around them it seemed like he'd drawn them around with dark coal pieces.

Sleep seemed to avoid him since the last week, just as he avoid Senritsu. He leaned against the doorframe, just as he was afraid to actually lose his foothold.

"Oh… ehm…" The young woman was too surprised by this question to be actually attacked in her privacy, therefor she just answered honestly with her little hands tipping thoughtfully a melody-tact at her cheek. "He was a friendly person, intelligent, responsible and very kind to the people he called friends, maybe he was a little bit too protective towards his friends." The young woman blinked perplex with a bright smile plastered on her face. She chuckled a little. Her laugh was a soft echo filled with warm memories. "To be honest, Kurapika, you actually remind me of him a little. The only difference is that he actually had another kind of humor, but that was just fine. I really liked his kind of humor and he liked to make me laugh even more."

"Did the two of you…" The young man, stressed, bit his pale lips and moved his hands to his mouth in a very awkwardly gesture, trying to hide his words under his hands, but of course Senritsu heard him.

Therefor she just blinked perplex before she gave a high, clear laugh–so loud and stentorian like swinging bells. "No, not at all! Our relationship never had been of this kind!"

She laughed so hard that tears filled her eyes, as she dashed them away from her eyes while she was still laughing in the most hilarious way like a cheerful little child. The thought was just too preposterous for her. "Why do you ask, Kurapika?"

"No special reason." The young man looked at her with a blank expression, searching for something in her face. When he found it he stepped back a little and looked as if he was shocked by his own mind. He looked away swiftly, feeling uncharacteristically embarrassed. "You just seem very fond of him when you talked about him in Yorkshin. I was wondering why."

Senritsu frowned her eyebrows as Kurapika's heartbeat unmasked his explanation as a lie. But she already know he wouldn´t tell her anything, so she just answered with a friendly wink flying towards his direction despite her real confusion. "Well… He was my first real friend. He always looked after me, cheered me up and I feel like he still do. And… even if it sounds strange, because he is dead, sometimes I have the feeling that he is still around me. It´s like I feel his aura."

Kurapika looked at her thoughtfully before he turned around to leave the room and like a little gust of wind his last words stroked quietly around her senses. "I know that feeling." And with that he left the confused smiling young woman alone in the music room.

Nen didn´t disappear after death; Kurapika knows that. In his lonely moments he was haunted by the last aurascraps of the Spider members he killed in York Shin like he was haunted by ghosts. And of course he had felt that strange extension of Senritu´s Nen that was far too wild, too furious, too different from her warm soothing Aura to be hers, but he had never cared about it up until the night a week ago when those strange aura pieces of the foreign Nen started to swirling around HIM.

In his sleep he felt the aura scraps patter down on him, mixing with his own Aura. Behind his closed eyelids there suddenly appeared pieces of scenes from long ago, memories of a life he had never lived. The Aura of the dead man was like a broken vessel that holds his memories and thoughts and like water dripped out of the broken vessel that the man's memories leaked into Kurapika's dreams.

Of course, SHE was there too, but it wasn´t the cursed short woman Kurapika knew from the beginning, but the person she had been before the Sonata of darkness changed her. Yet over and over again she was calling out a name with that soothing soft voice he still knew from the beginning wasn´t his name–but that man´s name; what Kurapika strangely disliked. In those memories of the dead man, Senritsu wasn´t beautiful, not as Kurapika had imagined how she had looked like before the curse. She was pretty but not strikingly attractive at all, a person he would see one time and then forget forever a minute after she passed his view. Kurapika wouldn´t be surprised if he had met her before in his life and forget her. But those big black eyes and her friendly smile when she called out the man´s name had something really lovely about it, something that made Kurapika like that unobtrusive face more and more whenever he saw it behind his closed eyelids.

A feeling the dead man seemed to have during his life too, because while his memories showed the young woman as his friend, his secret thoughts about her that distorted the peaceful memories followed a direction that made Kurapika's skin crawl like crazy. He could see the thought in flashbacks–the tanned hand of the man running across the pale thin back of the young woman, exploring her velvet skin and burying his face on that silky red hair, making both of them moan in pleasure. It was the moment when all of Kurapika´s insides felt like they were rumbled by a big hand. He was wishing nothing more than just to wake up and, if it wouldn´t be already like this, beat that dead man until he couldn´t move anymore for having such thought about Senritsu and let Kurapika SEE those thoughts.( He wans´t sure what was actually more akward for him). It felt so wrong seeing those dreams, those thoughts that weren´t his at all. And it felt even worse that a quiet voice at the corner of his head was whispering that Kurapika was wishing those memories and thoughts were his. Right when Kurapika's dream(that wasn´t even his own but that man's)reached that moment, there was something strange that echoed at the back of his head–a laughing, a nasty snicker, a mischievous chuckle. The dead man laughed in all good humor, snickering like a cheeky little boy: "Well then, boy, do what you like."

Suddenly it wasn´t the other man's scarred tanned hand stroking over her curves, but it was Kurapika's pale hand exploring the warmth of her skin and body under him. And it was not that man but it was Kurapika who was drowning her soft moans with his own mouth and eventually indulging into the inhuman desire to stroke one of his hands through that silky red hair of hers he still know from her present appearance. Even making her finally whisper only HIS name with that melodic soft voice of hers he likes to listen to even in the present time.

Like every time since the last whole week, the next moment, Kurapika wakes up straight upright in his bed with his eyes colored in the most brightest scarlet he had ever seen in his irises, his cheeks burned even redder, and with all his blood pumping down into areas where it had no business.

Wobbly like a puppet with cut strings, he stumbled forward to the little bathroom and still in his sleeping clothes, he locked himself up in the shower cabin to wash all the thoughts from his mind with the icy cold water from the shower until his lips were blue and his whole body was shaking like crazy. Those thoughts weren´t his, no, not at all, those were the man's, but that didn´t hush Kurapika's body reaction.

His pale face reflected in the bright tiles of the wall, but in the hunting twilight of midnight his face was strangely distorted. His hair was darker, longer, wilder, and framed his face that seemed to be sharper, somehow tanned and with more mature lines around his chin and cheeks. A smile in the most mischievous way splitting the reflection of his tanned lips finally hushed away all other similarities Senritsu may had once seen between Kurapika and that strange man in his reflection on the wall.

And while Kurapika stood motionless in the wave of cold water, eyes as scarlet as his cheeks as his thoughts ran back to his past dreams, a malicious laughing voice echoed at the back of Kurapikas head, sopping with all kinds of mischievous friendliness:

"That´s so cute. You're so confused about Senritsu's current looks and yet you desire for her. I just wanna help make things clear for you, my young friend."

Biting his lips that felt like frosty ice-cubes, Kurapika ended up wondering how on earth Senritsu could have ever liked that terrible kind of that man´s humor.

End.

Bai Feng: I really regret nothing. No, not at all.
Thought most of you probably look stunned at your screen. Mwahahahahahahahahahaha~
Alright, I wrote this while my exam time. You can´t blame me for hacing crazy ideas while this time. :D
I hope I could make you smile at least. ;)

THANKS A LOT TO Reeaya-chan for the Beta reading! Your the best!