Trading Hells

This is just a one-shot from Yu Yu Hakusho involving Mukuro. Very dark, but I decided to take a break from my other fic. I absolutely love Mukuro's character, and when I learned about how she met her fate when she was young, it made me think of this fic.

Rated M for blood, angst, rape, and self-mutilation.

You tell me you love me.

You take. You've always taken.

First you take the trust. Always trust. You. Others.

You tell me I'm your daughter, yet why do you do these things to me?

Sweat, blood, pain. My screams of pain mingling with your gruff cries of passion. Yet you don't hear me. The only ears that listen are the ones that are powerless.

A darkness enveloping me, taking me to another world, where you can't touch me. My body shakes, yet you ignore me.

You ignore your daughter.

I cry. I think you like it when I do that. My tears scald me and fuel you. I feel dirty. I am torn, physically and mentally. You call me your rose, you call me your flower.

Yet you hurt me. You take me in a way that is darker than my deepest nightmares.

I endure as you continue. You won't stop. I can't make you stop.

Darkness, welcoming me. Embrace me, please. Take me away from all this. I don't want to be here…

Daddy? Why…why are you doing this? Haven't I been the daughter you always wanted me to be?

I feel you stop. Your sweat reeks in my nostrils. It drips onto my pale shivering form. I don't move. I don't breathe. I wish my body would just quit. That by my own will, my desire to stop breathing would make it so.

But my body can no sooner stop in its desire for air then yours can in its desire for me.

Your lips claim mine in a final kiss, and then the nightmare is over. You tell me how beautiful I am, what a pretty girl I am, your treasure. Your daughter.

You always did treat me the way you treat the rest of your treasures. I feel dirty. I feel alone. I feel cold. I feel miserable…

I feel worthless.

I promise that you'll never do this to me again, no matter what it takes. No more nightmares. No more hurt. No more pain. No more crying and shaking and screaming for you to stop as I pound you with my fists, begging, but your power completely overwhelms me…

I run, my rags clothing me doing nothing to shield me. I run blindly, slipping, through the hall, begging you not to hear me.

I tried to run away once. You found me. You only hurt me more. You did it again, and again, and again…

Daddy, why?

How can I escape? How can I run away, when you'll just find me again?

How?

I run down to the basement, where you keep your other treasures. I see the walls. I see the shadows, with their safety. Their warmth.

I still hurt…my legs fight me. They want to stop. They want to rest. The pain in my lower body left by you is tearing…

Unbearingly familiar…

I see myself in a pane of glass. I see myself as you do. My beauty. My fiery orange hair. My wide, terrified eyes and tear stained cheeks…

I hate it. I hate you. Don't look at me like that, daddy…please, stop…

I cry out and lash at the reflection, the sound of the glass like an icy knife through my thoughts. I shout as a new pain finds me, my skin tears, my arm burns. I see the shards, as they fall to the floor red with my blood.

Did you like my blood. You see it too much not to.

The wet smacks as the life of me hits the floor. I look down, and see the red maw. I see the horrible red liquid ooze out in a dozen places, and every one reminds me of a time you took me.

Drip. Drip.

Like your sweat. Your stubbly cheek rubbing against mine.

Make it stop. Make the pain go away. Please. I don't want this. I don't want it…

Drip.

I see my face outlined in a thousand points, tiny islands in a red sea. The tide rises, washing over them all one by one. My beauty fades.

In desperation, I realize that's what I have to do.

I know how to make you leave me alone. I hate myself. I hate this face. I hate this body, that brings itself only pain.

You tell me you love me. Why does love always hurt?

You tell me you'll make it all better. But you never do. What's wrong?

I don't want to look this way. I'm ashamed. I hate myself so much.

I grab one of the clear daggers, my bloody hand smearing the blade. I hold the key to it.

I'll destroy what you hold so dear. I'll kill it. I'll make it go away, the way I wish you would.

I bring the sharp edge down into my body. The icy jolt stabs my mind as well as my skin. Your precious skin, washing away your sweat and reek and dirt with my own blood.

Cleansing me.

It's not enough. The pain it brings reminds me of the pain you inflict each time you take me. It doesn't matter what I say or do. You never stop. The pain never stops. First one, then the other.

It doesn't matter what hell I'm in. I'm always there. You drove me there.

I reach up, stepping in the puddle on the ground, throwing the glass away to watch it splash. I frantically reach out. I knock over everything I can. I hear shattering. I hear wood breaking. I hear crying.

My crying.

God, make the memories stop. Please. They replay in my head…

I pull on huge basin on a shelf above me, wanting to bring it down, wanting to destroy all around me. It doesn't move, but no matter. I reach out, wanting to destroy, wanting to die, the blood driving me to a mad frenzy as it flows out, marking everything it touches. I pick up a large metal pipe from the darkness, and fling it around wildly.

Every sound and contact that reverberates through my bones, makes me wish it was you. I hate what you've done to me. What you've made me become.

A huge crashing noise is one of the last things I can remember. The basin falls, releasing a flood upon me that causes me to scream.

My eye closes instinctively as it pours over my right side. I feel it tearing me, leaving a path of fire, incinerating everything on my body it touches.

I fling my head from side to side as it worms its way into my vision. The horrible tongues of flame racing through my small form, burning a horrible torment into my soul, into the dark where you can't find me.

It penetrates my secret fortress. I feel myself hit the ground, but I don't care…

I write in pain, but the fire cleanses. I feel it in my skin, in my entire right side.

Burn it away. Burn away you. Burn away my beauty. Burn away the hatred. Cleanse my hell with fire.

I feel it seep deeper, and my arm won't lift. I try to bring my hands to my face, to find my beauty peeling, burning, missing…

The fire released from my rampage will free me. I turn over, each heartbeat an agony, but one that brings me farther from you…

How many heartbeats pass? A hundred? A thousand? It doesn't matter. The fire cleanses every shadow, every memory, every pain, devouring it.

I see the glass…the hole and the spiderweb around it. Ringed with my blood from my outburst.

I see myself.

I'm no longer what you want me to be, daddy.

My fire, the beautiful hair you stroked, braided, and then pulled is halfway gone, replaced by a different red. My face is a dark purple, the entire side a ragged mess that doesn't register a sight. The beautiful eye you looked into, the one that cried, that widened in terror, that look you loved so much, is gone. Eaten away by the fire.

My arm is laid bare. The skin was also burned away. I can see the brutalized vessels pulsing and beating with every breath I take.

But it brings me away from you.

My leg, my hip, all useless. All burned away. All a shadow of what they once were.

I live. But you can no longer reach me.

I laugh. I know you can no longer touch me. I've burned myself away from you. I've passed through to an area you can never hope to reach.

I vaguely hear you. I think I hear you. I hear you scream. I hear you curse. I feel your rough hands on me as you pick me up, the world a spinning mass of noise and colors as I laugh from the pain. You touch my right side as you pick me up, but I feel the pain stopped at the door to my secret place. It won't respond. It won't answer.

It will never let you or another person enter as long as I live.

I am horrible. I am hideous. I am useless.

I am free.

As the darkness returns, I feel you move with me.

For the only time I have ever known, God has been generous. Hell is hell, but this time, I'll trade one for another…

Lock the door…and never let anything in again.

I wrote this just as a monologue. I might go back and change it.

Truth be told, for those of you that don't know Mukuro, according to Yu Yu sources I have checked with, she was repeatedly raped by her father when she was young. She poured acid on herself to take away her beauty, in order to free herself from her father's lustful ambitions.

He then had her body fitted with implants, and sold her into slavery. In a true sense of the word, she really had traded one hell for another.

Which one would you live with?

Please R+R. I rarely get this dark, but it is fun to flex that muscle once in a while. I might add more to this next time I get in one of those moods, but the ideas for continuing aren't as clear as I want them to be to put them down on paper.

Kusanagi