A/N: Remember me, folks? I know—this is the first thing I've put out since mid-summer! I've been fairly busy—I moved into a new place near my school, which obviously I've been attending, while picking up a little bit of work. I have been writing bits and pieces for my WIPs, so don't worry, they're neither forgotten or abandoned. I'm on break between semesters at the moment, so I thought I'd harness my time to get a leg back into writing and updating.
I started this last month with the intent of a one-shot. Since then this has become a three-chapter project, with the tentative one-shot becoming this first chapter. I got the idea from something we discussed in my Philosophy of Technology class, about how a virus actually alters the structure of a person's DNA—as does the vaccine given to prevent the virus, altering said DNA in anticipation of the bigger hit, providing a resistance. I decided to apply that here as a metaphor.
So this first chapter is entitled "Vaccine," and takes place during the Dark Tournament, shortly after Kurama's first transformation into Yoko Kurama. Yusuke's not present because, as I recall, he was busy getting jolted in a cave while that round was going on. . It's been a while since I've seen these episodes, but I aimed to keep the majority of events peripheral to this story vague enough that I'm hopefully not messing up the chronology of anything.
Onward:
vir·us: the causative agent of an infection disease
vac·cine: a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease
All definitions courtesy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.
Disclaimer: Yu Yu Hakusho is the creation of Yoshihiro Togashi and belongs to him and his business affiliates. Ideas expressed in this story are my own and I make no monetary profit from them whatsoever.
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Virus
01: Vaccine
28 December 2009
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He was getting looks.
From the spectators, whose mouths just earlier in the week had spat out insults.
From the opponents, whose condescending leers were now tinged with lust for the challenge.
From the teammates, whose foci wouldn't divert far from the redheaded point in the room, him.
To be fair, it might have been his food.
It was a steak, just like what was on the other two plates. It wasn't as well-done as Kuwabara's. In fact, it was bleeding, more so than Hiei's.
Kurama looked at it.
"Send it back," Kuwabara said, face scrunched with disgust. "This is sabotage by food poisoning!"
"Unlikely," Kurama murmured, still looking at it. Part of him wanted to postulate that—"Maybe they thought they were feeding a demon," he said absently.
He was hungry.
Eyes, four or five of them, on him as he pulled the plate closer to him, sank the fork tongs into the meat (more blood), grabbed the knife.
"You're gonna eat that?" Kuwabara asked in disbelief.
Hiei said nothing.
Kurama looked up abruptly. He was already chewing his first bite, and a little blood dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away. "Can I?" he asked.
No one said anything.
Kurama continued to eat, chewing the meat between dull human teeth, washing his tongue in the blood that leaked from the carnal bolus in the back of his mouth.
Thus, he was getting looks.
"How's it taste?" Kuwabara ventured.
"Adequate," he replied conservatively. He kept chewing.
It was delicious.
"Hungry?" Hiei asked in an offhanded, bored way.
"Yes," he answered, taking another bloody bite.
Very, suddenly. He was ravenous.
Kuwabara was blunt. "Do you feel any different?"
Because of a little rare meat? "N—"
Then it hit him, and Kurama looked up from his plate. "Because of Yoko?" Kuwabara nodded; Hiei seemed to look at him a little harder. "No," he said, popping another bite in his mouth.
Still the looks. "Oh," Kuwabara said.
Liar, Hiei stared.
Kurama swallowed. "Yes."
Something in him stirred.
Looks from the looking-glass.
Mirror-eyes studied him as he in turn scrutinized the form in the glass. This is not my body, he reflected, staring at the green-eyed, redheaded creature in the other dimension, and wondering if he directed those thoughts as much toward the flesh he looked out from as well.
Heaving a sigh, he leaned forward and rested his brow against the steamed glass. It felt cool on his skin.
His skin?
My skin is not my own, he thought, smiling faintly. Frank Herbert: a sign of high intellect given way to nerdiness, if ever there was one.
And he'd read those books, hadn't he? He, Shuichi, who only grit his teeth against a recurring stomach pang, because there stirred in an even more visceral depth of himself something parasitic, awake now only thanks to a whiff of miasmic air, fresh to it and toxic to him. Revived now, it made its presence palpable via a desperate and near-maddening gnawing, like that of a tapeworm, scraping his insides and yelling at him, demanding from him, Feed me!
Feed me, Seymour!
He chuckled a little. Oh, he was Shuichi; and that phantom come to surface earlier was the parasite, the—
He closed his eyes and shuddered, shivered, hugged himself against the chill and backed away from the cooling glass and porcelain, but the chill persisted.
"Are you sick?"
His surprise betrayed itself in a flinch. He took a breath. "Pardon?" he said, twisting his body round.
With narrowed eyes Hiei considered him from the threshold. "I want the shower," the Jaganshi said flatly. "Retch if you have to, but flush that toilet and I will put you out of your misery."
Ah. "I'm fine, Hiei. Just cold." Hungry, nauseous, shaking…
"Perhaps you should put your towel back on," Hiei said mildly.
"What—?" he began to reply, and then with a more prominent chill realized that his towel was in fact on the floor, having probably fallen during his self-reflection. A bit of heat returned—to his face, at least—as he stooped to pick it up, and replace it around his waist.
Hiei watched him. "You coloring's changed."
He paused. "Excuse me?"
"The color." Hiei shifted, made a gesture. "On you. It's different." Kurama looked at him, looked at the mirror again. The Jaganshi shrugged. "Never mind. Maybe it's because you're sick."
"I'm—"
"Fine," Hiei finished, walking past him. "Could be the lighting. Could be my imagination." He stood before the shower and began to undress. Kurama remained in front of the sink, his expression troubled.
"If you're cold," Hiei said while turning on the faucets, "getting dressed might help."
Right. "Yes," he agreed, tightening his towel round himself and telling this body, his body, Move! He'd forgotten he was cold.
He'd forgotten the moment he saw Hiei undress.
Something in him stirred.
He was in the bedroom he shared with Hiei. He hadn't dressed yet. He had the lights on, and stood in front of another mirror, and stared hard.
Maybe too hard. Maybe he was imagining. He had to be, for something so minute to have suddenly grown so profound.
For surely Hiei had not meant his pubic hair—had he?
Kurama glared at the red bush that bloomed around his genitals. Rose bush, he thought with a wan smile. Was it darker?
If there was a change, though, wouldn't it have made more sense for the color to lighten? He looked his reflection up and down, while the mirror-eyes reciprocated. His skin seemed lighter, clearer. It seemed to contrast with his hair more.
Or maybe it was the lighting. Or the mirror.
He groaned. Or maybe it was all in his head.
Hiei was probably right. The Jaganshi was his partner, and surely as Kurama could appraise Hiei for any abnormalities—a change in attitude or an incapacitated arm—Hiei could reciprocate.
Here's to Hiei doing so without feeling aroused. Kurama had already learned by experience not to underestimate the demonic nature of human puberty. Perhaps it factored into his greater toleration of their teammates' quirks.
He sighed, and curled up on his side on his bed. For his verbose conduct, Kuwabara was ultimately a gentleman; and for Yusuke's typical adolescent crassness…
Another sigh. Even if Shuichi Minamino's behavior was more temperate than the average pubescent human male, he was a demon. Possessed by a demon, as surely the surge in energy flow had caused a surge in other flows as well. He sighed, reached up his hand, and pushed his still-damp hair back.
He sighed, reached down his hand, and parted his hair there.
He sighed.
Blood rushed to one head, blood rushed to another. Kurama stretched his legs out, flexed his toes. He shuddered pleasantly.
Ages ago, that first shudder heralded a long line of nights spent in warm beds, heat shared with intimate and anonymous partners alike. Now, he was rubbing himself among chilly sheets, and thinking that even a year ago, his life had been much more simplistic and contained, that even now he might still have a greater degree of control, were it not for this body having technical difficult—
"A-Ah!" he cried, jerking his trunk one way while bucking his hips another. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his cheek against the pillow. And then he sighed.
Or perhaps he groaned.
Or perhaps he sobbed.
The door opened. Slitting his eyes, he watched Hiei come in, toweling off his hair. It was the only towel he had. Kurama closed his eyes and turned his head away.
Hiei detected his movement. Kurama heard him turn, felt his eyes.
"Well?"
Kurama stayed still. "Well, what?"
"Are you still sick?"
If even one of them took ill presently, it would bode such for all of them. "I'm not sick," he said. He could still feel Hiei standing over his bed, watching him. He'd never gotten dressed like he said he would.
Something stirred in him. He imagined he heard it this time, a visceral growl rumbling outward from is core. "I'm hungry," he said.
Nothing stirred in the shadow cast over him. "You're hungry," its source said.
"I exerted an unexpectedly high amount of energy today." And leftover energies were still stirred up like molecules put to heat. Although, to say that he had "exerted" or done anything else with that energy was nowhere near factual. Rather, that energy had been wrenched out of him, torn forward from his primal store, briefly, and then jammed back in. The sentiment brought to mind a similar insult done to Kurama's physical innards, the contents packed back in out of alignment.
Malpractice! his cells screamed, while their nuclei glowed and swelled and vomited with this newly-awakened potency, awesome and awful.
He could feel Hiei's eyes on his nude profile. "Do you want anything?" the Jaganshi asked after a full minute.
You, something down to his newly-mutated cells said, screamed. He closed his eyes tighter, darkness aside, but this didn't stifle his vision of Hiei's body naked in the shower, tanned back, muscular frame grown more defined recently with additional conditioning. Kurama's own muscles tensed; he bit his lip.
"Kurama." He continued to bite, but let a semi-coherent "Huh?" slip between tooth and flesh. "Do you need anything?"
He needed that box to open again. he needed that box to have never opened to begin with. He needed to hide somewhere alone. He needed Hiei in bed beside him.
He couldn't voice any of these needs, and so he voiced nothing, thus prompting Hiei to repeat the admonition, "Don't get sick right now."
Hiei didn't do so groundlessly, Kurama knew. Considering the odds intentionally weighed against them, no one on the team should fall out of sorts at present. Knowing this, Kurama also wanted to decry the unfairness—the hypocrisy—of Hiei's prohibition, wanted to snap that no one had managed to sift their own agendas out of collective well-being—so who was Hiei to lecture him, who had asked for that box t catalyze the thing deep in his viscera no more than he had asked for the chemicals in this body, his body, to start secreting sabotage.
Sabotage aside, however, he was the group's Common Sense. "I'm not…" he began faintly, unsure what he was actually protesting. As he wondered this he turned slowly toward his partner, saw his partner, locked eyes with his partner's natural pair—and lost control of coherent thought. He made a sick sound from somewhere deep in his stomach, where his wind, his resolution, should have been. He squirmed, having lost the order best suited for arranging his too-long, too-bare legs.
He could not fault Hiei for staring, could not fault Hiei, much as it made his insides churn, when the other demon, other demon, said "Kurama?" without the non-inflection of full-fledged boredom. Revert to no concern! Kurama wanted to implore him, wishing that he was still in the shower.
Shower. Hiei naked, much as he was now, but. His eyes were not his own, led astray by thoughts that were not his own, could not be his own, so vindictive that even when he squeezed his eyes shut the traitorous images persisted: Hiei naked, soap water running down lines as clearly defined as though etched there by a sculptor, white lather like chalk added for definition, white lather down to those thighs, to…
If Hiei were Yomi—and the two did share a certain recklessness, a certain abandon of common sense and heed to external instruction—Kurama would jump him, pounce on him and pin him down, prone or supine, brace his hands against tense hard muscle while he thrusted, arched or pounded down, relishing and even hoping for resistance, the angry gnashing of teeth, the spiteful wedding of ivory snarl with flushed flesh. And if he were Kuronue—which given time and maturation, he might more closely resemble—Kurama would smile a smile cultivated to look coy so as to be in fact lecherous, and either creep on top of him, or taking him by the hand guide him over…
But he was Hiei.
And Kurama kissed him.
Perhaps he'd been readying to say something, or abut to protest, because what Kurama's open mouth found was hot and wet, and contained something that wriggled in greeting. Kurama stroked it back to its base, while outside their mouths his hands gripped Hiei's biceps, his chest heaved against Hiei's pecs, his body, this body, frenzied, the one that was his outlet as still as the chiseled statue in his mental comparison.
Hiei did not shove him off. Hiei did not have to, for almost as soon as Kurama latched on, he reeled away as violently as if he'd been thrown. He gasped, chest heaving, and stared at Hiei with the same wide-open yet unseeing eyes of an air-drowned fish, no longer cold.
No longer cold. Far from cold. Kurama stared at Hiei, naked Hiei, who had not even the towel anymore and so was naked as he. But Kurama could not discern the features of Hiei's face, could not even discern these physical details that a moment ago he had fixated with such eroticism. Something stirred inside him, but it was not that something that split his vision facing inward facing outward at once miniscule and grotesquely mammoth in sight of the macrocosm the microcosm within without him.
No longer cold. Hot. Uncomfortably hot.
Something stirred inside him. His feet could barely outspeed his flinching stomach as he forgot Hiei, forgot all beyond immediate necessity as he vaulted off the bed, ran into and repelled off the doorframe, collapsed to his knees upon the tile which surrounded his white porcelain target, flung up the lid—yelped as it ricocheted off the tank and came crashing back down upon his head—and wrung out his stomach.
Water into water. Something stirred inside the bowl.
Something stirred across the floor. Something cast a shadow over him. He didn't raise his head to look. He didn't feel he could. At the moment if felt like the toilet alone kept him upright and not crumpling head-first to the floor.
Hiei spoke. "Not sick," he said tonelessly. Then: "How fine are you down there?"
Weakly Kurama propped himself up on the collapsed steeple of his hands. "I think I have a virus," he said, voice a low groan.
"You have food poisoning," Hiei told him, adding, as though he had it himself, "Kuwabara was right. A human body shouldn't consume flesh that fresh."
Human body. This body. His body. Kurama couldn't tell if that was truly disappointment that he heard in Hiei's voice, or if it was placed there by his own agitated mind. "I…" he panted, trying to prop himself up. He weaved back and forth, up and down, elbows flexing, and managed to push himself back so that he sat on his heels.
I?
"Sorry," he murmured, head tilted forward, eyes cast downward.
Something sailed through the air, landed on him. The world was white as porcelain, though softer than the tile against which his knees ached, or the toilet against which his skin chilled. How interesting, when he was sure his skin must be mottled strawberries-and-cream from the effort of heaving. At least the flush in his flesh had migrated northward, he though with a mixture of relief and shame.
Hot and cold. The flush in his flesh began to subside as slowly he rose on quaking limbs, tried and on the third attempt successfully gripped and pushed down the handle on the tank. The towel slid off his head.
Eyes on him. He caught the towel and clumsily placed it round his waist. "Sorry," he murmured again. He shuddered. Hot and cold.
The faucet ran. Hiei was wetting a washcloth in the sink, was handing it to him. Handing it to his waiting hand. My body is not my own, he thought abstractly, gawking down at it was seemingly without thinking he took it.
"You're pale," Hiei told him. "You're flushed. Go lie down."
Kurama blinked, blank. He swayed on his feet. "I'm sick' he said, whispered, licking dry lips; to no avail—his mouth was like cotton, like the towel that hung off his hips.
"It'll pass," Hiei said.
Will it? Kurama wanted to ask. He stared at the Jaganshi with the wide-open fish eyes of the afflicted and overwhelmed.
The Jaganshi stared back with the narrowed sulphuric eyes of the tried and tired. "Don't be belligerent," he said brusquely. He grabbed Kurama's wrist and pushed his arm upward. Kurama caught on, and held the wet cloth to his forehead. Hot and cold. Hiei placed a hand firmly on the Fox's hip and steered him toward the door. He caught on, and stumbled to his bed, Hiei spotting him from behind.
"Go to sleep," Hiei told him as he lied down. "Don't eat any more raw meat. You'll get over it."
Would he?
He was getting looks.
From the spectators, whose mouths baited him with cat-calls.
From the opponents, whose condescending leers dissected him as he passed.
From the teammates, whose foci would lock in on him on a spare beat.
To be fair, it might have been anticipation.
"Feeling better?" Kuwabara asked uncertainly.
A skeptical look passed out the corner of Hiei's eyes into the corner of his own. "Yes," Kurama said, masking his own uncertainty.
Something in him stirred.
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End "Vaccine"
A/N: Next chapter's set to be called "Virulence" and should take place during the Three Kings Saga. Let me know what you think so far. Good to be back!