Ozymandius
By: Kowareta
Wherein Hiei and Mukuro prance happily about a field of flowers and corpses.
Disclaimer: I do not own Yu Yu Hakusho.
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She lay in a sea of crimson, gazing at the sky. Dirt stuck to her face, now wet, like tears of mud. Her loose-fitting clothes were torn and ripped; thorns bit into her flesh. The woman's arms were marked with jagged streaks of red, and raggedy orange hair fell over her eye, over the mask that concealed half her face. Her calm blue eye watched the equally calm blue sky as geese flew over--brazen, witless birds riding the zephyr waves. Clouds drifted across that sky like contemptuous fish that glared at the scum below. The woman stared back coolly; her expression was like stone, solid and solemn.
The field was choked off by small red flowers. They were plants that fed on blood and moldering flesh--only growing on the sites of gruesome battles. It was almost poetic the way a battlefield stained in red would gradually become a sea of small crimson flowers. It was as if they existed as a reminder to those who survived that the blood spilled here would remain forever. But the woman didn't believe in poeticism.
It didn't matter whose blood was shed. The plants didn't care if the person whose blood dirtied the ground was good or bad. It didn't matter to them the deeds of those whose corpses they wrapped their vines around. All that mattered was the soil, the air, and the blood that nourished them.
Mukuro liked things like that.
No matter who you were, a king, a slave, a lord, a subordinate, you were only a corpse in the end. Food only fit for the plants that left bones asunder or for flies and maggots that wiggled through decaying flesh. Love and hate and war and peacetime could only get you so far until your body lay resting on the earth; cold, open, and bare.
With great effort she sat up and fresh blood flowered from wounds newly created by the leeching vines. She stripped her body of the thick coiled green ropes and ripped the flowers from her hair. She didn't much care for pretty things. Some women in her position might find themselves attracted or obsessed with glamour and beauty. Mukuro saw no need for this behavior. Glamour and beauty were never impressive. It didn't show others the raw world. It wasn't real.
Mukuro plucked a flower from the ground and carelessly tossed it towards the fire demon who lay close beside her. Instantly, he snatched the flower away from his nose and sat up, vines and thorns ripping loose from his skin and causing his poorly recovered wounds to reopen. He glared at the flower suspiciously--almost like he expected it to explode. The demon lord became amused.
"It's not going to eat you, Hiei," she told him wearily.
Hiei didn't seem inclined to agree. Which altogether wasn't too surprising considering the time he'd spent around Kurama in prior years.
"At least not until you are dead," amended the woman.
The fire demon grunted to himself and tore off the vines that bound his arm. He'd suffered more injuries than Mukuro had in their last battle and his body was swathed in blood and scars. He ached from exhaustion.
Hiei blinked. He'd lost his shirt somewhere. Lost, however, was a general term. Stripped off in the heat of battle, sword clashing against bloody sword, and just about to call on the Dragon of the Darkness Flame was more like it. Hiei didn't care though. He didn't argue technicalities.
The fire demon pulled out the ratty bandages that were entwined between his fingers and began to wrap up his arm--almost completely ignoring whatever injuries the limb may have sustained. Hiei made his own worst doctor.
Mukuro noticed the tears of mud upon her face and wiped them off with a dirty sleeve. She looked at the sun.
"We've been unconscious for a day it seems."
"Not surprising," murmured Hiei unhelpfully.
The orange-haired woman evaluated her legs, wondering if they were capable of supporting her. She frowned, then tried to stand.
"Summoning the Dragon was unnecessary," she commented.
Hiei curiously watched the unsteady sway of Mukuro's hips as the demon lord tested out her footing. She stomped on flowers whose creepers tried to curl around her ankles.
"It worked," he answered curtly.
Mukuro discovered a pile of charred black bones. There was a skull among them, hardly recognizable as the creature it was before. Flowers poked through it. The woman smiled.
"There could have been an easier way. One that would not have sapped your strength."
Hiei shrugged and continued to watch Mukuro.
The demon lord knelt and gently tugged the skull from its chain of foliage. Its jaw was shaped much like a crocodile and was constructed in such a way that might suggest it could unhinge itself. Scraps of memory flickered through her mind and she remembered the demon who'd commanded the attack against them.
She abandoned the skull. Creepers draped languidly back through its eye sockets. Mukuro nodded approvingly. The dead belonged to the earth: cold, open, and bare.
Hiei glanced at the sky, lifting a tired arm to shield his eyes from the sun. Bright yellow rays beat down upon the red landscape. No traces of fire or charcoal remained. The Dragon had consumed most of the landscape then, but now crimson flowers waved softly in the breeze, completely covering the Dragon's effects.
Blood dripped onto his fingers, running from a wound on his upper right arm. Beside his hand lay his sword, devoid of blood. He ripped it free of green tendrils and examined the battle-marked blade with a critical eye. It would need some serious sharpening, and he'd have to oil and polish it again.
With his left hand, he wrenched his sheath from the foliage and slid the sword back into it. He rested the hilt on his bare, strong shoulder, wrapped an arm around it, and draped his arm over his knee. He sighed.
"Someone's lost his eye," Mukuro observed, glancing vaguely at her shoe.
Hiei chuckled darkly.
"Stand," said the woman, approaching him.
The fire demon stood, inserting his sword into his belt as he did so. His legs trembled once and he toppled forward. Mukuro caught him, her arm encircling his waist. Sharp pain shot through Hiei's leg and he clenched Mukuro's shoulder.
"There's no sense in that," the woman told Hiei when she caught his angry glare.
"Hn."
As they walked, supporting each other, Hiei swayed slightly and almost jeopardized their balance. Mukuro repositioned her arm, dragging the fire demon closer to her, for a better grip--and so Hiei didn't kill himself by tripping over stray bones and cracking his head when he plummeted to the ground. Not that Hiei was accident prone, merely impossible to deal with when injured. Mukuro reconsidered. Letting him fall on his own stubborn accord may take him down a few pegs.
"You were caught off guard," Hiei noted. His hand was placed firmly on Mukuro's sturdy back--where blood seeped through the tattered fabric.
Only, realized the demon lord, before that happens, he might just knock everyone else from their pegs.
They tottered for a while across the expansive field of red until they came across a heap of corpses. None of them were charred, so they must have gotten out of the path of the Dragon.
Their bodies were raked by lines of red; large green-yellow bruises, quickly turning black, marred their flesh. Their eyes had been picked at by carrion birds and a ghastly, ugly expression sat on their saggy faces.
The stench was overwhelming.
Here, Hiei and Mukuro paused. Not out of respect for the dead--neither demon had that kind of sentiment; the dead were dead for all they were concerned--no. But they were both struck by the same thought: would there come a time when they too were lain out on the earth; cold, open, and bare?
The rotting pile of corpses wriggled causing both demons to tense. Out from beneath the heap crawled a struggling figure. By one clawed hand it pulled itself, grunting in exertion as it did so. Its other hand looked limp and useless. The skin of the creature was gray and crusty. Whatever gender it was couldn't be known as half of its lower anatomy was missing and its upper body was too charred by mortal flame to tell. The only reason it wasn't dead from blood loss was because that same mortal flame that charred it, cauterized the wounds where it would bleed. Its face contorted, blind with pain and rage at its helplessness.
This was not beauty. This was not glamour.
The creature continued its blind one-armed crawl until it reached the feet of Hiei and the demon lord. It then realized it was not alone.
"Help," it croaked, not knowing it beseeched the enemies it and its comrades had tried to destroy a day earlier.
"Help," it croaked again. "You can help me."
"Few have lived with your kind of injuries," said Mukuro without remorse. The creature gasped when it recognized her voice. "Your death will be one of agony."
The dying figure, pitiless in the face of the world, struggled through its pain and snarled.
"Then kill me. If I am to die then I should die at the hands of those I make my enemies."
"No," said Mukuro, looking at Hiei softly, "your death is your own."
The pathetic creature hissed and struck out towards Mukuro. Hiei crushed the questing hand underfoot, endangering his and Mukuro's balance as he did so. Together, they toppled to the ground, away from the demon howling in anguish.
Renewed pain flooded through the fire demon and the woman as their bodies collided with the earth. Instead of gasping in pain like a normal person, Hiei converted the pain into anger and attempted to leap up and draw his sword. However, his body couldn't handle Hiei's aggressive demands and his legs collapsed under him. Mukuro almost chuckled.
Later that day, as the two demons lay there, their battered bodies unwilling to get up, the creature would die--in agony like Mukuro said. And the demon lord and her companion would be the only ones to hear its final desolate shriek. But the world still spun, the wind still stirred, and the small crimson flowers still dotted the field.
This is the raw world: this is the world as it was without glamour or beauty. People and souls aren't pretty. The prettiest people you see are just as ugly as you are.
Upright again, supported by each other, the two demons continue on their way. Step after step, the fire demon watches the woman, his hand on her back and her arm around his waist. They have a conversation with no words, expressing themselves only through their actions.
Mukuro stared straight ahead as the fire demon watched her.
Hiei has red eyes and a penetrating gaze. He has the kind of eyes that see right through a person and never considers how that person came to be standing before him. There would never come a time when he would have to question whether or not the person standing before him was good or bad because people are only people and Hiei usually didn't care.
Mukuro walks, sure of every step, smiling calmly whenever her companion mutters unflattering remarks about the desecrated enemy. Her expressions are always of stone and are much like Hiei's in that regard. Both faces seemed to be part of some living rendition of the great Ozymandius with nothing but contempt for the world around them. But Mukuro has one blue eye, and she can only see people and things as they truly are.
And people are not beautiful. Both she and Hiei have ugly souls. The ugliest. But they were souls that had already lain before the earth; cold, open, and bare.
The demons' shadows mingled closer for a tender, quiet moment, then returned to normal as their slow and steady walk continued. Hours later they would leave the bloody battle site behind and the lone and level fields of red would stretch far away.
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