Touched
Chapter 03:
"Float"
Hiei was in the Makai when he felt the pull arching through one world and into another, blind and unseen hands groping for and finding his body an instant before his Jagan was able to force the push-pull out. Mukuro had about two seconds to realize that the fire apparition was no long walking at her side before turning, seeing the stricken look on his face, and opening her mouth to ask what the hell he was so damn tense for. Hiei only got that look when he or someone he cared about was on the verge of dying, so she was, of course, a tad bit alarmed when she saw his eyes snap open wide and his lips all but disappear as he pressed them tight together.
"What's wrong?" she asked again, and his pupils dilated down to the size of gnats as he bared his teeth to speak.
Then the demon started to float.
Well, 'hover' at any rate; the abrupt action lacked the gentleness of the word 'float.' One second the soles of Hiei's boots were planted tight on the ground, and the next they weren't by about, oh, half a meter by Mukuro's estimates. They were roughly equal in height at that point, Hiei's body as rigid as a rake as he stared into thin air like he was trying to light it on fire.
And perhaps he was. You could never be sure with Hiei.
Mukuro watched in morbid fascination as Hiei stayed in the air for a good minute and a half. He didn't twitch or flinch or speak; in fact, he didn't blink even once during the entire process. The only reasons why Mukuro knew he was conscious through the whole ordeal were because she could see his chest rising and falling like a runaway train—all carefully controlled jerks and twitches even as the actions spun faster and faster with every passing second—and the tension coiled in his muscular forearms as his fists clenched down by his black-clad thighs. Hiei was trying very hard to stay calm, still, and collected despite the raw fury burning in his scarlet eyes, but he couldn't fool Mukuro.
"Well shit," she said at last, and Hiei's eyes met hers.
"Don't say a word," he hissed, and just as abruptly as he had been picked up he was set down—and none too gently, too. His boots connected with the stone floor with a loud 'crack'; the demon stumbled for just a second before finding his balance and acting like he had never been off of it to begin with. Hands immediately moved from his sides and vanished into the depths of his pockets.
"Wanna talk about it?" Mukuro asked after a half-minute of awkward, not-looking-at-each-other silence.
Hiei turned and started walking down the hall.
"There's nothing to say," he said, and thought: Not to you, at least.
Kurama was not so lucky. The company in which he found himself when he floated was not as understanding as Mukuro.
When it happened, he was in the kitchen making limeade for his stepbrother, who sat in the living room playing a video game on the couch. Kurama had taken a break from the action to fix the drinks, and he was doing so with deliberate slowness because he was not enjoying his time behind a PS3 controller as much as his mother had thought he would.
The whole thing had been her idea, of course. She was going on a weekend-long date (to the seashore, no less) with her 'new' husband of five years, leaving her eighteen year old stepson in charge of the house he'd lived in for the duration of that marriage. Only, neither of the parents had thought Little Shuichi quite trustworthy enough not to have a wild party in their absence (while the cat's away the mice will play, they say), so they had enlisted the twenty-three year old and much more responsible Shuichi-san to housesit.
"Think of it as… forced bonding," Kurama's mother had said when she asked him two weeks prior. "I know you've both grown up since I married Shuuichi-kun's father, and that the growing up took place apart from one another, and that you're both different people now than you were when you first met, but I just wish you would still take time to be together. You are brothers, after all."
The human side of Kurama was still unable to resist his mother's doe-eyes, it seemed, which led him to spending two solid days and nights of playing videogames with Shuuichi-kun in the living room. Kurama had been more than happy to make drinks when Shuuichi complained of thirst, so long as he could rest his weary thumbs in the bargain.
He had not thought the bargain would also include flying lessons until it was much too late.
It felt, by Kurama's reckoning, like someone applied pressure just below his ribcage and pushed him upward into the air. Besides that pressure—and the lack of solid ground beneath his linen house shoes—he experienced no other sensations, unpleasant or otherwise, and he was able to move enough to bend and set the limeade pitcher on the counter without spilling any of it.
"Oh my," he remarked when he straightened into a standing posture. Green eyes had opened wide with a mix of good-nature amusement and dangerous scrutiny. "I was not expecting this."
Shuuichi-kun, of course, chose that moment to enter the room, see the lack of support Kurama was experiencing, and say: "Are you done with the—Oh. Oh, oh…" He leveled a finger at his brother, grey eyes wide beneath his fringe of messy hair. "You're, you're—"
"Floating," Kurama remarked, and Shuuichi fainted dead away.
The force suspending Kurama in midair released him a moment later, and he touched down on the ground with all the grace he could muster—which wasn't much considering the circumstances, but was still more than Hiei had managed. His knees buckled and he leaned heavily on the counter for support, fingers clenching atop the pink tile in one cold swipe.
He regarded Shuuichi-kun's crumpled body through cool green eyes, wondering just how much Dreamflower pollen it would take to convince his stepbrother that his vision of a flying redhead had been nothing but a distant, distant dream.
Kuwabara was at home studying when it happened to him. He sat at the kotatsu—heater turned to the lowest setting because the cold September night outside was windy—with his math homework spread in a dizzying fan of charts, graphs, and calculation sheets across the table. A pencil balanced precariously behind his left ear as he punched numbers on a calculator with his thumbs, and Shizuru called from the kitchen: "You want marshmallows, too?"
Kuwabara rolled his eyes. "Um, duh? Who drinks cocoa without marshmallows?" He would have gone on to tell her that cookies were an essential cocoa-companion, as well, and that she needed to bring him some A-S-A-P, when all hell broke loose. The sheets and graphs and calculations went everywhere, a sudden snowstorm of misplaced paper and ink, when the kotatsu overturned from the force of Kuwabara's flying knees. He yelped as the pull at his midsection yanked him high into the air, feet and arms flying as he desperately tried to come back down to earth. He ended up kicking the heater exposed on the kotatsu's belly with his socked foot; the scent of singed cloth told him he had burned a hole on something, somewhere.
"Uh, sis?" he yodeled, still flailing and hoping that none of his worksheets had gotten immolated.
Her reply came like a cracking whip. "Look, I'm trying to find them, OK, but Dad must have hidden the stupid mar—"
"THIS IS NO TIME FOR MARSHMALLOWS, SHIZURU!"
Shizuru bolted into the room as fast as she could (which is to say she walked in at a leisurely pace, because Shizuru never did things as uncool as 'bolt'). The cigarette nearly fell out of her mouth when she saw her baby brother's midair ballet. He kept making these weird swimming motions, like he was going for a frog-stroke speed record or whatever, and he kept doing flips so hard that his face had gone green, but she recovered quickly enough and walked over to examine him.
"Quit that," she snapped, catching his ankle in one hand when he nearly round-housed her in the face. "You're gonna kill yourself."
"What's happening to me?" he yelled, flailing all the limbs Shizuru hadn't managed to grab hold of. His scared expression became a touch more hopeful when he looked at his older sister, the woman who had gotten him into one of the best highschools around despite his horrible middleschool career, and because of this Kuwabara was of the opinion that Shizuru was capable of just about anything. Hell, he'd even managed to get into one of the best colleges around with her tough love as encouragement; if there was anyone who could figure out Kuwabara's new "talent", the psychic thought, it was Shizuru.
Shizuru opened her mouth to shatter her brother's dreams—"Beats the shit out of me," would have been her words of choice—but then Kuwabara plummeted out of the air like a missile, collided with the ground, and proceeded to gasp for air like a beached fish. The wind had been knocked out of him.
"Well, baby bro," Shizuru said with a wry smile. Kuwabara looked into her eyes with shining, adorable expectation. "It looks to me like you just learned how to fly."
Yusuke, unlike the others, was not in the comfort of his home, his family, or people who would understand him when he floated. Of course he wasn't—who in their right mind would ever expect Urameshi Yusuke to have good luck?
Yusuke, you see, was a work.
One of his late-Monday-night regulars had just sat down to order their usual beef teriyaki ramen bowl with a sigh, complaining of a sore back and how one of his fellow construction workers had mistakenly unloaded a truck full of I-beams on the wrong side of their worksite. Yusuke jokingly told the man to punch the offending party in the nuts as he shook the water out of a freshly boiled batch of noodles, and as he tipped the wire-mesh ladle into a bowl he felt himself get jerked off the ground with a gentle tap on his diaphragm.
Luckily, when he bought the ramen stand four years prior to the floating incident, he had picked one with a roof that was only a few inches taller than he was. He had picked it so he could still run his business during rainy weather, and though he had never anticipated the roof coming in handy quite the way it did when he floated, he congratulated himself on his foresight nonetheless.
"You OK?" the regular asked when he looked up from his hands, which were folded atop the counter as he internally debated what to do about the careless employee. He had looked up because he heard Yusuke swear quite colorfully, and what he saw was more than a little weird: Yusuke had (in the construction worker's unknowing eyes) seemed to stand on his tiptoes so that his head was pressed tight to the ceiling, and from the eyeballs down his body was as tense and stiff as an uncooked ramen noodle. A single breath could break him, he was so tense.
"Oh no, I'm totally fine!" Yusuke gritted out from between clenched teeth. He was smiling a fake, cheesy grin so hard his cheeks had begun to hurt. Behind the counter, his feet twitched in the air as he sought out the ground that suddenly seemed much farther away than a mere four inches.
"You sure?" the construction worker asked, eyeing Yusuke as the boy chopped vegetables and poured broth with arms like a badly oiled robot's. A knife in the kid's stressed hands probably wasn't a good thing, come to think…
"Oh yeah!" Yusuke ground out, voice tight. "New type of yoga. Flex your body and hold it tight. Does wonders for the, uh, spleen."
"I'm sure," the worker agreed, and he bolted his food so fast Yusuke swore the man set a record. To his intense relief, the man paid without asking for change and ran off (he was, in truth, rightfully freaked out by the manic glint in Yusuke's eye and the pulse pounding in the youngster's bronzed temple).
As soon as he was gone, Yusuke put his hands to the ceiling and pushed, hard. "Oh c'mon!" he snapped, straining against the roof, but no matter how hard he pushed he could not get his head away from the ceiling. "Why me? Why me all the time!"
He didn't use his full strength, of course, since that would likely result in the roof getting torn off and thrown halfway clear to France, but he most certainly did try to get down. Yusuke cursed and yelled and struggled, twisting in midair as he tried to shake himself loose, but no matter what he did he couldn't budge.
"My head's a magnet and the roof's one of those effing I-beams that guy kept yakking about!" he said, swearing up and down. "What the hell is this shit!"
He was still pounding on the roof when the force let him go. He shot to the floor with an 'oomph' and landed hard on his knees, and when he recovered he stood, checked to make sure no one had seen him freak out like that, and began to paw through the red backpack heretofore hidden underneath the counter.
"C'mon, c'mon, just show up, dammit!" he muttered as he pawed through receipts, order forms, and spare clothes. "Just—"
The cellphone rang before he could locate it, but thankfully the chipper ringtone helped Yusuke find the object more quickly. Caller ID declared that 'Your Worst Nightmare' was waiting on the line.
"That's the last time I let Kuwabara get a hold of my phone," he said, glaring at the stupid name, and then he flipped the device open and held it to his ear. "I'm assuming it's you, you big lug?"
"If by 'lug' you mean me, then yeah," came the sound of Kuwabara's scratchy voice. He sounded fidgety, wary, and calm all at once. "So what's up?"
Kuwabara's quasi-casual tone made Yusuke blanch. He had just floated, for Buddha's sake, and Kuwabara wanted to know what was up?
Well, then. That made the conversation that much easier, didn't it?
"I'm up!" Yusuke snapped. "And before you read into it, no, I don't mean that in a gay way, you sicko!"
"I—"
"I just fucking levitated!" Yusuke interjected. "Levitated! Last I checked, I don't know how to do that!"
Instead of snapping at him with an affronted rebuttal or a skeptical reprimand, Kuwabara went silent. He went silent for so long, in fact, that Yusuke would have suspected he had hung up if it weren't for the 'call in progress' banner scrolling across his phone's screen.
"You there?" he finally said. By then his voice had calmed down significantly, though he was by no means out of FreakOutLand just yet.
"Yeah," was Kuwabara's immediate response. "I'm here. And I floated, too."
Yusuke let that sink in (Both of us? What the hell?), and then he snorted. "'Levitate' sounds cooler, you dork."
Kuwabara: "Shut up." A pause, and then: "I think we should call Kurama."
"Call me back when you're done," Yusuke said, teasing despite the circumstances, and before Kuwabara could complain the ex-Spirit-Detective-turned-private-eye-slash-ramen-chef hung—
—the fuck
—up.
Bang, baby.
NOTES:
Sorry for the multiple 'f word' droppage. I just feel like I can't write Yusuke without a certain degree of cursing, and... (*sheepish*) It just happened. And the third-person-omniscient-perspective-with-shifting-limitation was a real challenge to work with! I enjoyed it a lot!
Kaijin-san drew a FANTASTIC illustration of Hina using her powers on the clothes, so please go check it out. It really is awesome and I was NOT expecting to see Hina get drawn so early in this story's run, so it was a great surprise. GO SPOIL HER ROTTEN WITH COMMENTS, PLEASE! Link's on my profile. ^^
So I guess technically, this chapter and the last chapter happen at the same time, linearly speaking.
The next chapter is centered around Yusuke and the boys. Guess what happens!
THANK YOU SO MUCH, REVIEWERS! You are all awesome to give this fledgling story such kindness, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being so nice to me even though I don't deserve it. DevilAngelWolf27, Reclun, Kaijin-san, LadyoftheGags, XxXTwilightSinXxX, Out-Of-Control-Authoress, Miyakomono, Zetsubel, AkaMizu-chan, itsallaboutbob, HeeHeeHee01, DoilyRox, SillyGoddessDisco, Mihakuu, Pirazz, loser94, etowa-ru, MissNayru, DragonDancer93, Dreamehz, Foxgirl Ray, Panda-chan31, chocolateluvr13, Montblanco, Willowleaf2560, Lizzie-Lizzard, Raging Lulu, Reality Bores Me, and kaitou angel!
