Chapter 6:
Music Suggestion: Murasaki no Yukari by Rin'
Nothing is worse than being less than two.
Shizuku had forgotten who had said that, but the quote still lingered in her mind. She blinked behind her black glasses and picked up her book again, trying to forget about it.
The door opened and closed; a youthful but manly form entered and sighed, sitting down on the couch opposite the chair she sat in. "What's the matter?" she asked without looking up.
"Shizuku, you'll ruin your eyes like that." There was a soft click as the lamp on the table next to her was switched on.
"I'll be fine," she answered. "It's really an excuse, isn't it? Shalnark."
She looked up, finally, and her eyes landed on the tall figure standing in front of her. He stared at her for a minute, gaze innocent and wide, before laughing good-naturedly and rubbing the back of his neck. "Well, yeah, but it's really a bad habit to read in the dark, you know? Anyway, I brought food."
He placed a couple of takeout boxes on the table and scooted forward a chair so that they were knee-to-knee. "Did you steal it?" she asked, returning to her book.
"Ah, no. I'm not Ubo, after all. No, it's just too much hassle that way; finding someone coming out of a restaurant and hoping they ordered the food you want. I chickened out and bought it."
"I don't care what food I eat."
"No, but I do." He paused and gently tugged the book out of her hands and laid in his lap. "C'mon, eat up! I'm going to keep you accountable for eating, you forgetful person, you. Don't make me stick you with an antennae and force you."
"That's not very comfortable at all," she answered gravely, and opened the box. "What is it?"
"Curry."
"What do I eat it with?"
"Chopsticks." He lightly tossed a pair of paper-sleeved wooden chopsticks at her, and she caught them. She broke them apart and then paused, just looking at them.
"Shizuku? You need to eat."
"I was just thinking, sometimes in my dreams, a man comes."
"A man?"
"Yes."
"Does he wear a black trench coat with a reversed cross on the back?"
"No." She shook her head adamantly. "No, he's huge, with scars across his face, meeting on the bridge of his nose. And his hands are huge, too big to hold chopsticks." She smiled a little wistfully. "And his voice is so gentle."
Shalnark sat there in silence, remembering Franklin. He had been the first of them to be killed three years after Pakunoda. Phinks, Nobu, Feitan and Machi had all followed.
But that was the past. Like Shizuku, he needed to forget.
"Eat up," he said firmly and with a smile, as he got up and went to the kitchen of the hotel suite for a couple of glasses of water. As he reached up on the shelves, Shizuku's voice came and he turned around.
"Shalnark?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you." He could swear there was a tiny of quiver in her voice as she said that.
He sighed again, very, very softly.
.
He had been followed for two hours now, and still he ignored whoever it was. The footsteps were heavy and badly concealed; it was a man, probably a second-rate Black-List Hunter, for all Hunters were not created alike. He wondered vaguely if he was being tracked because he was a Kuruta, or because he was a Spider.
Either way, it was nothing to worry about. Even if there were ten people tracking him, he would still continue as he was, walking down the secluded woody path of uninhabited Kyoto prefecture.
He stifled a yawn, willing his eyes to stay open. It had been a week since his fiery encounter with the nen-ghost of Kuroro, and still he stayed awake. It was inhuman. He was inhuman. Like Akatsuki, he was a set-apart remainder of a noble breed, tainted with a barren past.
And her? Where was she now? He was obsessed, Stockholm syndrome of the escaped hostage; the captive who yearned to return but could not. It was better than returning to that other place, where memory scalded and left bubbling scars over the already hacked remains of his soul.
December would descend soon, in cloaks of brown and very occasional white. Maybe it would snow for real. Would he still be here to witness it?
He closed his eyes as he lifted them, unseeing, to the grey sky above. No, he decided. His rest was over, he would travel to China and research new fighting styles and weapons. He had become a machine; he mastered and passed on, and all he learned was geared toward a single purpose. To rid the world of corruption using the bloody engine that was his Spiders. It wasn't enough, avenging himself; it wasn't even, achieving his own goals; in order to survive, he had to press on, to become the Reaper for those who could not fight back. That was the only thing that kept him pushing through the whips and scorns of time. There was no need for a bare bodkin.
A twig snapped loudly behind him, and, greatly annoyed at the other person's lack of subtlety, he turned around. "End it," he said, and unwrapped his right hand, the cold trinkets of his weapon jangling into existence.
No reply. "Come!" he shouted, letting his Dousing Chain still its pendulum swing and then raise, quivering towards the woods.
In a flash, he chased the retreating figure, superhuman speed despite his recent lack of sleep. "Ah," he said at last, as the man he caught up to wheeled around, and twenty other figures emerged from the woods.
He smirked as he held out his chain. "Shall we begin?"
They did not approach in the style of bad action flicks, where each bad guy approaches the hero one at a time, to get defeated easily before the next ran up. No, there was system, and there was cooperative effort. Still, it almost bored Kurapika to tears, hardly needing to utilize Emperor Time at all to throw attacks and counterattacks of his various mastered categories of nen. The problem was quickly becoming evident, however; he could not kill with the non-Spider oriented methods he was using, and it was becoming increasingly annoying to keep battling foes who fell down and got back up. They were relentless. In the past, his enemies had gotten the hint after a couple of hits with the Dowsing Chain, and gave up, but this time there were too many to block all of the bullets and knock away their weapons; they just kept picking them back up and continuing to fire. If he'd still been using his tanto, it would have been a different story; but those were left behind in a cave in Mongolia, where nen was forbidden and a sonata lay in a charred pile of ash.
The sound of chopping air interrupted his tired mind's wanderings, and a second later something slammed into his back from behind. Another bullet, evading his chains, sank its lead bite into his left thigh, and he was forced down to his knees, gasping in pain as the helicopter landed.
A fat, bald man descended, signaling to his accomplices to cease fire. Kurapika still knelt there, gasping, eyes the color of fire. He remembered this man, from over five years ago, the one called Zenji.
He narrowed his eyes as the smirking man came within five meters of him. "We've found you at last, Kuruta."
.
Coltopi sighed loudly, and Bolonolev looked up from where he was meditating on the other side of the room.
"What's wrong?"
"Just...the Spiders...don't really feel like the Spiders anymore, do we?"
"Well, that's pretty obvious, don't you think? All of the original members, plus Danchou, are dead, and we're slowly being replaced with new members."
"True." Coltopi chewed on his lower lip, a habit he had formed as a result of nobody being able to see that he did it. "But it's not just the members. The whole purpose of the group is different."
"Yes, it is. The main objective of the Genei Ryodan used to be mainly theft, not destructive cultural reform."
"It's not that he's forbidding us to steal things," Coltopi said, nodding at Bolonolev's assessment, "we can do that in our own time; but our missions used to revolve around getting to some rare item, for the money, for the object, or even just for the challenge. This is just brutal destruction."
Bolonolev gave him a sideways glance through the leather strips that covered his face. "Don't tell me you're feeling bad about killing people."
Coltopi snorted in reply. "Of course not. But there used to be more purpose behind it. That's what made being with Danchou so much fun."
"Fun..." Bolonolev mused. Yes, Tenno seemed to have very little idea of the concept of "fun". No, he had been a hell-demon bent of revenge, and finding revenge unfulfilling, now sought to make excuses for more bloodshed.
But it seemed so unlike the cool-headed yet fiery teenager that had outwitted them five years at York Shin. What could have happened to have frozen him into this granite ice-sculpture?
.
Kurapika gritted his teeth against the pain, against the exhaustion, as he stared up at the man who was a walking example of greed.
"What do you want."
"A couple of things. Revenge, and the second follows; possession of the last living Kuruta."
"I am not an artifact, to be collected and stored among gruesome displays." He willed his eyes to return to black, but they kept flickering red.
"No? Well, that's just too bad."
"I would rather die."
"What, like your little friend?"
Kurapika gasped. "What the hell are you talking about. What friend?"
"Oh, don't you remember anymore? Too bad, she was such a sweet little thing, smile like rays of sunshine, voice like running water. But she was in the way, and things that are in the way are gotten rid of."
A wistful shadow of musical laughter rang clear through the cloudy chambers of his mind.
Kurapika's eyes turned fully to orange-scarlet. "That...she was killed...by the leader of the Genei Ryodan, what are you talking about? How do you know about that?"
"Ah, that's where you're wrong. Let that sink in, venerable Kuruta; you were wrong. Kuroro Lucifer was not the one who killed your friend. We did. The Mafia. It's a little funny; who knew one person could change so much over the death of one insignificant insect of a girl?"
Pain forgotten, he stood up. His movements were so fast that Zenji only had a split second before the Judgment Chain pierced his heart.
"Don't shoot!" Kurapika shouted at the waiting men, uneasily shifting where they stood. "One move from any of you, and he'd dead." He turned back to the wincing man in front. "A question."
"Wha...what...what was that..." He looked up at the captain of his team of men, but Kurapika recommanded his attention.
"If you even consider calling your accomplices to shoot, you'll die instantly. A question: What did she say before you shot her?"
"I...don't...remember..."
The chain in Kurapika's hand tensed suddenly as it crushed Zenji's heart, and he ripped it out before the other man fell lifelessly to the ground. He looked around, daring the other men to shoot. He didn't know how much longer he could last with his nen so drained from exhaustion, but he would do this last thing. For her.
They tensed, not ready to fire, but then it came. A flash, and whistling through air, and inches in front of him, a shining katana stuck in the ground, its ivory inlaid handle pointed towards him, ready to fight.
Without glancing up at the disappearing white kimono, he pulled the blade out of the ground grimly. There would be no further use of chains for today.
.
The last man fell, and Kurapika stood there for a minute, dazed, still gripping the bloody katana, hardly aware of the helicopter pilot taking off in fear. His hazy gaze muddled the trees as he began stumbling blindly forward.
Kuroro lifted his head as the door opened for the first time in over a week. Kurapika, haggard, looking like he was about to drop on the spot, but most of all, completely drained of all vindictive spirit he'd had, staggered in.
He dropped to the floor and lay there, motionless. Sympathetically, for once, Kuroro quietly came over and sat next to his supine body. "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all?" he quoted softly.
Silence.
After a minute, Kurapika said, wearily, "How come you never told me you weren't the one who killed her?"
A vague sense of numbness in his pain as the real world flickered and left.
"...would you have believed me?"
...
"Maybe."
"Would it have made a difference?"
"Yes."
"Would you have reformed the Spiders if I'd told you?"
"...No."
"Why?"
He tried to force his dizzy mind back into the real world, where his footsteps were stopping to stand still, but his conscience drew him back to Kuroro's question in the spaceless room, and he reluctantly answered.
"Because I wouldn't have wanted to drive you to despair. I wouldn't have wanted to show you my determination to destroy your will, by being stronger than you and leading your group better than you."
"That seems childishly straightforward," Kuroro said with a smirk, yet thinking to himself that there was another force behind Kurapika's purpose that he'd didn't even know about yet.
"Oh, what do you know," Kurapika snapped as he rolled away from the man beside him, so that he was lying on his side. After a minute, Kuroro sighed.
"I guess I never did have someone who meant that much to me, let alone lose them in the most painful way."
"Try losing everyone that way." The crunch of dead leaves as he fell to his knees.
Kuroro smiled ruefully. "Which really hurt you more, Kuruta? Losing your family, or losing her?"
"They're incomparable."
"...True."
"But if I had to answer," Kurapika rolled back over and looked up into Kuroro's inquiring eyes, "I'd say that losing my tribe ten times over wouldn't be half as painful as losing her. Back then, there were dozens of people for me to love, to love me in return. But...for three years, it was just me and her. We only had each other. We only needed each other. She was sunlight; she was..."
He stopped before continuing, not letting flashes of unuttered thought pass his lips: that she was healing the only part of him he couldn't heal himself: his own self. The pain of losing her was just too great, he couldn't bear it; he had locked everything that was human away.
"Are you actually opening up to me?" Kuroro gave a Cheshire grin.
Trees, barren branches, leaving the world of light completely.
"Be nice."
Kuroro smiled. "For once, I think we understand each other, Kuruta."
Kurapika's legs finally gave out as darkness claimed him, and though he was not aware of it, he landed not on stubbly undergrowth, but in the soft lap of a white-clad geisha.
Author's Notes: Yes, I killed off Senritsu. She was my favorite character besides Kurapika, too (little sniffle). Oh, and by the way, in case you haven't read "Notes on a Kuruta", this is post destroying the Dark Sonata, when she's regained her original form and is (to Kura at least), somewhat attractive. I hope that answers some of the questions about why he changed and about his motivations, although I can't help but think that they're a little unclear, even now. I'll be clarifying more later.