Evergreen
Author's Notes- The weird, one-shot lovechild of myself and a bottle of Finlandia vodka. I'm not very fond of it, but I have so many weird YnM one-shots filling up my computer that I thought I should probably start doing something with them. After this, there's Tokyo After Midnight (Weiss Kreuz crossover, Hisoka/Nagi), Pawn (an AU full of joyously evil Hisoka) and a few untitled bits that should probably remain hidden forever (er, Tatsumi/Muraki, anyone?). Anyway, this jumps around in time and is probably a bit confusing, but if so, no explanations are given. Draw your own conclusions :P
Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.
"Why didn't you help Tsuzuki?" Hisoka asks Tatsumi abruptly, his voice breaking the tranquillity of the bureau gardens. It's always too tranquil here, and he's glad to ruin it, to shatter air that's always graveyard-silent and filled with the drug-heavy scent of blossom, the wind as breathless and dead as everything else here. Tranquil, as though the grounds haven't seen centuries of bloodshed and loss, as though the inhabitants don't bring death wherever they go. Tatsumi glances up, startled, and they pause like that with the cherry blossom weeping pale silk over the scene.
A week had passed since the incident at Muraki's laboratory. Tsuzuki speaks little these days, and it's almost a relief. When he does, it's painful to watch him going through the motions, like a worn-down toy reaching the end of its useful life, an arthritic circus animal creaking through old tricks for treats. Hisoka dragged Tsuzuki back from the edge, just as Hijiri and Tatsumi and all the others had coaxed him back time and time again. He wonders how many times you can put someone back together before their soul becomes too shattered to ever restore again. The cracks have been showing for a very long time now.
Tatsumi has no answers. His silence hangs between them for too long, louder than any words.
"I spent sixty years trying to help him. I don't know if some things can be saved."
Hisoka nods, and lets Tatsumi turn abruptly and walk back inside, his back stiff and his head unbowed. He waits under the cherry trees, to spare Tatsumi the indignity of being seen with tears in his eyes. It's a token gesture that means nothing. An empath doesn't need to see tears to know that they are there, not when guilt stains the air around it with a bitter stinging mist he can almost see. Decades of shame seeps into Hisoka, and he thinks this is how synaesthesia must feel. Regret adds a sharpness like pear drops and strychnine, but over it all Hisoka tastes something that isn't quite pure saline. He's well acquainted with the taste of sadness. Emotional tears have a unique chemical make-up.
A breeze ruffles the blossom somewhere over his head, and it showers over him lighter than rain. Hisoka scuffs aside tufts of grass and the carpet of fallen petals. They fall year round, yet they're still as white as funeral silk right down to the earth, and the underneath layers never turn wet and brown no matter how much time passes. Here, there is no ashes to ashes and dust into dust. The petals never rot and the dead walk again. The tree branches are never stripped bare by the seasons, even as months stretch into years, and years into lifetimes. The living find the fleeting nature of the flower to be part of their beauty, but here the cherry blossom are beyond fading, beyond death and beyond time itself.
Evergreen
They say that the cherry trees drinks the blood of corpses, and that's why the white petals are stained pink. The ground here is saturated with death. By rights, the flowers should always blossom black.
- - -
"You should learn shadow magic," Tatsumi told him, trying to keep Hisoka distracted in the days that followed. Hisoka likes the idea. Shadows are the antithesis of the man that gave him this new life, and it lends his world a pleasingly aesthetic sort of dichotomy. Everything can be divided into black and white, into shifting, creeping darkness and bleached hospital whites that Hisoka thinks are the true colour of death. Shadows have never hurt him. It's the colourless edge of a scalpel that he fears.
Hisoka practises by candlelight. It grants the shadows an uneasy sort of life, and they jump and flicker by themselves, waiting for a single thought to bring them leaping out from the walls. He stares at the shifting patterns of light for hours, and watches another featureless Hisoka waiver in and out of existence with the candles' endless ebb and flare. The edges blur as the light changes, but the centre, the umbra, is always the darkest part of a shadow. This is where all light is blocked.
He turns his head slightly to glance at the clock, and feels something shifting and gathering behind him, something without weight or form. He glances back sharply, and his own shadow, tethered at his feet, whirls with him just a second out of synchronisation.
Once you start seeing the power in the shadows, it's difficult to turn your back on them again.
- - -
Years pass.
Hisoka practises for hours at a time until he sees their silhouettes capering in his dreams, but the shadows dance elusively just beyond his touch and he cannot make them collect at his will.
Tsuzuki still works with Hisoka when he has his good days, but everything is wrong now. Hisoka is old enough to know that things will never be the same, and young enough to keep on pretending. When they bicker, Tsuzuki's quips are always a second too late, as though he missed a prompt. Hisoka's replies are never as caustic as they used to be, and Tsuzuki looks grateful and guilty all at once. If Hisoka turns too quickly, sometimes he can see the shadows that have fallen over Tsuzuki's face, a second before a false smile chases them away like watery morning sunlight breaking through clouds. Sometimes, the empath can't feel anyone there behind him at all. His own shadow seems to have more substance than Tsuzuki does these days.
But he pretends it's the same. They go through the same pantomime year after year, harvesting souls one morning and slacking off in a tearoom the next. They're always over budget, underpaid and out on a prayer. They meet new Tsubakis and Hijiris and Marikos, and sometimes they save them and sometimes they don't. The work does not suffer and no one says anything. Hisoka is sixteen at heart no matter how many lifetimes pass, and he will not regret holding onto Tsuzuki, even if this is all he gets to keep. Sometimes it's enough.
And sometimes he wonders if Tsuzuki has reached his autumnal years, and thinks of cherry blossom shredding apart under sharpening breezes. Not many shinigami can hold themselves together indefinitely in this job. A lifetime or two of watching lives fall to ruin, and most pass on. Faces change in the office as the years go by. Watari and Konoe and Tatsumi all move on to the next stage one by one, but Tsuzuki still hangs in there grimly, even as everything begins to fade. Hisoka doesn't feel the pressure get to him. The job gets easier every day.
The shinigami around him come and go, but he is evergreen.
- - -
Muraki is still around, scattering ruin and discord throughout the Ministry's files. Whatever demon he sold his soul to has kept their end of the bargain. A lifetime has passed, and he hasn't aged at all.
"You look as lovely as ever," Muraki traces the curve of Hisoka's cheek, always the fine bones of adolescence and never broadening into adulthood. He runs his fingers lightly through hair that will never fade to silver. "Such beauty should be preserved,"
Hisoka clenches his hands, ten crescents bitten sharply into flesh that's only really an imitation of life, and life cut down at sixteen years of age at that. Life can't fade in and out of reality, can't walk between worlds, can't remain ageless as lifetimes wax and wane around it like candlelight. It can't be cut down time and time again and rise once more, it can't hold itself together as decades pass and his hair remains the untouched gold of dim autumnal mornings. The dead can never really come back at all.
He bites his lip and tastes blood, and it's enough to remember. Even if it's only a pale imitation of real, human blood, the taste of copper brings back the night he bit clear through it in his agony. He lost sixty percent of his blood that night. They say forty percent is fatal, but Hisoka was past telling the doctors about the secret characters that now throbbed just under his skin, keeping him alive so they could kill him all over again.
He's seen a lot of pain over the years, but he's still human enough to feel the same indignity that they all have, in the end. They never really accept that their own life can end, no matter how many others they see finished around them. Even the most pitiful wrecks keep struggling to breathe just another minute longer, with steering wheels embedded in their chest, sixth degree burns charring limbs down to blackened bone, half their head gone to pulp.
The shadows burst into life around Hisoka. Freed from the bonds that tied them to the earth, they are formless and shape themselves at his fingertips. They weave through the air and for a second, everything is black before the darkness splinters itself into thousands of shattered glass pieces.
The shadows slip back to the ground, the floor thrumming lightly with secret power beneath him. He wonders how he ever missed it.
Muraki is gone. Hisoka saw him bleed twice before, but it seems wrong every time that Muraki's blood is the same rich, raspberry-and-wine crimson as any other mortal. The colour is too hot, too vital to come from something like Muraki. Muraki should be as dry as a brittle spider husk, his thin blood creeping like mercury through his veins. Besides the spattered blood, he leaves nothing behind but a lingering ghost impressed on the air, something that could only be sensed by an empath. The sudden kiss of Muraki's emotions against his own is sweeter than desert rain. There's shock and disbelief, and underneath it all, Muraki is in pain.
Hisoka could come to like it.
- - -
He dreams about her sometimes.
Tsubaki is dying, but there's a faintly mad smile illuminating her cooling, pale face as she talks about him, the sudden passion enough to almost restore her beauty. He can do nothing to save her, but bite back his words and let her sing Muraki's praises while her throat wells up with her dying blood. Her eyes are too bright and distant, somewhere Hisoka can never reach her, seeing something that he can never understand. She spins her stories against the backdrop of explosions and hopeless screams, and all he can do is let her talk while the ship goes down and the rising saltwater around them blushes pink as her life runs out of her in thin crimson threads.
The wounds will take a long time to kill her. She presses her hands against a deadlier flower blossoming in her chest, blood welling up from a shot that has shredded the soft spongy tissue of her lungs. He raises the gun, over and over again, his hand wavering. It's only a pistol, but it weighs as heavily as the life it will take. The Egyptians believed that a heart heavy with sin would be weighed against a single feather to pass judgement upon the soul. He wonders how his own would measure as he watches Tsubaki, framed in the pistol sights.
Each night, it takes less time to pull the trigger.
- - -
Sometimes, Tsuzuki is unwell and Hisoka has to escort them alone.
This girl's candle burned out long ago, and she has yet to cross over. He watches, pensive. It's not demons or a family spirit watching out for her. It's that simple, stubborn human instinct that keeps her alive long after her soul has gone stagnant and died inside her.
She sleeps late in the day to pass the time, and there's no school, no job, no friends to distract her. When she has to get up, she moves clumsily through the apartment as though anaesthetised. Her hair is lank and unwashed, and she's been wearing the same clothes for days. There's little to watch, but Hisoka stays there and drinks in her life. He comes to know the girl, how she stands in one spot for too long, too numb to do anything. Sometimes she opens a bottle of pills and takes six or seven and falls asleep too tired to care if she'll ever wake up, or makes shallow cuts and squeezes them to see if they'll bleed out. Sometimes she wanders out by the side of the road, wishing she could bring herself to stand in front of one of those cars, and takes the dark alleys back home, wondering if a maniac will kill her.
Hisoka follows her up onto the roof on the third visit. He touches the cold, slack flesh of her face to catch her emotions. It feels as lifeless and rubbery as a mask, but behind that, there's all the crushing weight that's the burden of simply being alive.
He lets the barrier in her mind go, and watches the girl fall.
Watching her land is a sudden, brutal dose of reality. Falling so many floors can wreak terrible damage upon a human. Bones explode out through their fragile flesh casing and tear from their joints, organs burst open like water balloons and sometimes they have to dig up the concrete if the blood soaks in long enough. Hisoka watches her hit the ground, hard enough to bounce back an inch or two. There's a dull, unimpressive wet smack, and it's all over. Her long hair hides the misshapen skull which no longer holds her mind.
The pain is gone, as easily as snuffing out a candle.
Tsuzuki never could let the suicides throw their lives away over some fleeting sadness, a pain that's nothing against another sixty years of life. He always pleaded for them at the Hall of Candles. Hisoka doesn't know why. Letting them go is the easiest thing in the world.
- - -
Another lifetime passes, and Muraki is timeless. He still has the lovely, cruel features of a marble statue, but his are more enduring yet. Hisoka tracks him down alone, outside the Ministry's orders. It's breaking a thousand rules governing the judgement of the living. Taking a life should never be personal. Hisoka has stopped caring.
It's easy enough to find the traces Muraki leaves, like dark stains amongst the registries of the dead. Hisoka sifts through the catalogues of deaths and disturbances, closing in all the time. Here is a new cult, a sudden spate of followers crucifying cats, removing their childrens' teeth with pliers and setting themselves alight, with their last ecstatic expression burned into a death grin. There's a school that mysteriously sank into the ground and swallowed up four hundred lives, blamed on an underground fault. A handful of villages claim the apocalypse is coming after minor demons storm through their home. It's all there.
Once you know Muraki as Hisoka has done, he never really leaves you. You can see the signs everywhere.
The confrontation is nowhere near as satisfying as he had hoped for. He'd imagined it several times over, played each possible outcome and decided they were all worth it. Muraki gave him this afterlife, willingly or not, and that's all that's driven him for these years. But it was over very quickly. When the time came, there was nothing really left to say to Muraki.
The doctor senses him as soon as he appears, but the shadows are faster than thought. Muraki flinches, too late. It's very difficult to ever escape your own shadow. They can only be abolished in absolutely pure, surrounding light.
The shadows love Hisoka now, and they rise at his bidding. His pulse quickens as he feels the sudden surge of power that rushes up through him, from a time before there was light or life in the world. Before he has time to draw breath, they pierce Muraki in a dozen places. He hangs there, crucified.
Muraki looks up, coughing a fine red mist into the air. He's still laughing, laughing through mouthfuls of blood.
"I love you," Muraki says. "You're more corrupt than I could ever have hoped."
Hisoka thinks of cherry blossoms shredding apart in unnatural breezes, of a full moon that came so low she scraped herself raw on the bare black branches that splinter the sky above him, of three long years losing himself through the open wounds that no one else can see, and he does not falter.
The shadows tear apart in a dozen directions, and everything turns red and black.
- - -
Hisoka became a shinigami to find out why he was murdered. Muraki gave no answers before he died, and now his inexplicable mind is lost somewhere in a puddle of blood and pulp, his soul gone to whatever demon may claim it. It doesn't matter so very much. Hisoka thinks he can find the answers himself.
His purpose is gone, but he carries on. He watches them pass over in a thousand different ways, in accidents and suicides and illnesses. Sometimes they fight it. He watches in hospitals as they're blasted with irradiating light, hooked up to machines for decades at a time, organs cut out and replaced with clips and tubes and pacemakers to jump-start a faulty heart. Sometimes they throw themselves over the edge willingly, from rooftops and in front of cars, washing down bottles of medication and whisky or choosing a slow choking death spinning on the end of a rope. Sometimes they're born blue and lifeless before their eyes even open.
Emotions can crystallise with enough time and pressure, like the coolly burning gemstones that form under the ground. They say diamonds can one day decay back into graphite, but the estimated time is longer than the age of the universe.
In the Hall, candles flare up suddenly and are gone in decades. While they last, they're as bright and beautiful and doomed as a star gone supernova. Hisoka watches human lives running away like sand between his fingers. The anger is gone. Another sixty years of life is nothing.
All flesh is grass.
- - -
"I thought you'd come," Hisoka stood slowly, in the wreckage of Muraki's laboratory. He might have been waiting there for days. It's difficult to tell any more. Time ceased to have any meaning long ago.
The rooms are still blackened with Touda's cleansing fire, the floor still buried in a layer of twisted metal and glass ground to dust. The decades have slipped away and mortals have left this place untouched, as though the ghosts that could have been that night still haunt it. The shadows have wrapped themselves softly around him, so softly it's difficult to tell where he ends and they begin. It's easy to lose yourself in them. Hisoka lets them fall away now, floating weightless to the floor like a shroud, and these days he's always surprised that he doesn't disintegrate with them. Tsuzuki whirls around.
"They want to send me for judgement, I suppose," Hisoka idly makes the shadows dance at his touch as they rise up from the floor again to kiss his fingertips. They send out tendrils lighter than smoke and mist, staining the last few patches of light in the room.
"I haven't told them, yet," Tsuzuki said, a little desperately. "If you move onto the afterlife yourself.. I've been waiting for you-"
"Yet," Hisoka said, turning the word over thoughtfully. The shadows shift and reform themselves in the palm of his hand, tendrils curling between his fingers almost protectively. Entire lives have gone to dust in the time he has been a shinigami. Here, everything is beyond the petty vicissitudes of the everyday world, beyond pain, beyond space and time, beyond life and death.
He is evergreen.
"I loved you," Tsuzuki says. Hisoka watches the shadows play in the palm of his hand. A handful of nothing at all, less than black gauze and cobwebs and moth wings. Tsuzuki's life and breath, suspended between his fingers.
"I know," Hisoka says, as the shadows begin to sink into every surface and softly blot out the world beyond. As Hisoka watches the world disappear, he does not fear and he does not regret. He thinks of reports handed in late and smudged with sugar icing fingerprints, of immortal flesh and bone blown to fragments before the fire of Muraki's creation, of life lessons spent watching candles flare and fade. He thinks of fuda magic spiralling through Muraki's webs of games, of tears shed for each and every life that slips through Tsuzuki's fingers, of cherry blossom that never fades. He thinks of Tsuzuki turning back from Touda's fire for him alone, of stolen drowsy sunlit mornings in teashops, of eyes gone the humid purple of summer storm clouds with promise. Before the shadows steal the last of the light from the room, he meets Tsuzuki's gaze and sees no anger, no hatred, no regrets.
The shadows splinter and tear themselves to a thousand shards.
Everything turns red. Red, and black, and evergreen.