Chapter Seven: Of Black Roses and (Psychopathic) Romance
Aieka steeled herself and stole a peek around the corner of the house. No Rio…thank God!! Then she dashed to the front door. No, the front door was too big and noisy; he would hear it and be in the main hall before she could step one foot inside. She let go of the door handle and started to sneak over to one of the windows. She wouldn't even have come out of hiding if it weren't for the fact that she had to cook lunch in about half and hour.
She stopped. How was she going to cook lunch without Rio finding her anyway?! She hadn't really thought about that… He knew she had cooking duty and was probably in the kitchen waiting for her right now! Damn Naraku once again!!! This one was complicated. She could either just walk in and take it like the warrior she is, or keep futilely creeping around the house until she was inevitably caught. She looked around. What was she thinking?! She is a warrior! She can't keep hiding like this! She has a reputation to uphold!
Aieka triumphantly started walking toward the door. And then, just as her foot hit the stone pathway…! She dashed around the house. What the hell was she talking about, being a warrior?! This isn't an army she was talking about, (she could wipe them out in half a second), this was Rio. Screw her reputation; this was about survival! There wasn't anyone to see her outside anyway. She had to remember, he wasn't known as "Rio, The (Psychotic) Gothic Killer" for nothing!
She let herself slide down the wall. If Yume would have just shut her mouth like I told her I wouldn't be here hiding like this! Now he probably thinks I was "with" Hiei. Hiei… If Rio gets to him, he deserves whatever Rio decides to do to him. He probably caught Yume in the hallway and is interrogating her right now… Wait…! Oh crap… Poor her! Aieka stood up. I have to go help her. Rio was mad as all hell in the hallway. Who knows what he decided to do to her! If only she would have listened!!!
Aieka dashed around the corner and…! Ran smack into Yume. The hit and landed on their butts on the ground.
"Oww! Yume…?"
Yume was up in a flash, "No time! Keep running!"
"What's wrong?"
"Rio!"
They heard his boots run across the stone walk. Aieka could recognize his steel-toed combat boots anywhere and those horrible, fate-sealing footsteps would probably haunt Yume's nightmares for eternities to come.
"No!!!" they screamed in unison and then they were running for their lives around the house.
Just as they passed under a window, something flashed out of it and pulled them inside and shut the window again after them. They couldn't see anything around them because the room was pitch black and their eyes hadn't adjusted. Then someone grabbed the backs of their shirts and drug them through a doorway.
"We've been captured! Now they're going to torture us, Aieka!" Yume wailed.
"Yeah," Aieka said sarcastically, "They're going to put us in cheap plastic formfitting suits and make us sing backup for Brittany Spears."
Yume gasped, "It's worse than I thought!"
"But then again, think about the alternative waiting for us outside…"
They shivered.
A door shut behind them and the hands holding their shirts let go. They heard a lock click in place.
"I was just joking about the thing about Brittany Spears!!!" Aieka said.
"You can't play around at a time like this! We've been-"
"Rescued." two familiar male voices said in unison.
"So shut up." one of them added.
Then four candles lit up in the decently sized closet they were in. The men who saved them were Hiei and Sesshomaru.
Aieka and Yume stood up.
"Oh, thank you." they said.
"Sesshomaru? Hiei?" Aieka asked surprised, "Why are you here and why did you save us?"
Sesshomaru answered, "Well your mate, Rio, suddenly burst through the door to our room-"
"Burned through the door, really." Hiei added.
"-and demanded we tell him why you were there."
"While trying to kill us. You can't overlook that."
"We had no choice but to jump out of the window."
"You jumped out of the window?" Aieka asked skeptically.
"Yeah, and nearly killed me when I was trying to hide outside!" Yume cried, "I looked up after I heard a crash and I see are anuses!! Anuses, falling from the sky! It was traumatizing… Anyway, so I ran the other way. Then I turned the corner and saw a black blur run around the corner and I thought it was Rio so I doubled back again and saw the real Rio jump out of the upstairs window. I started running, but he saw me anyway. Then I turned the corner and ran into Aieka-"
"Leading Rio right to me!"
"It's not my fault!" Yume yelled.
"Yeah it is!" Aieka yelled back, "If you would have just shut up-"
Sesshomaru and Hiei grabbed them and covered their mouths just as they heard someone walk by.
"That's not the point!" Sesshomaru whispered, "The point is that we're being chased by a murderous Fire Apparition all around the mansion! Aieka, you're his property, so can't you calm him down or something?"
"Hey! I'm not-" then she sighed, "It will take him a while to come down from this actually. He's really jealous-"
"Obviously!" Hiei and Yume muttered.
"Oh shut up! Anyway, he's really jealous. I figured he would do this…"
"You knew Rio would do this?!" Yume whispered fiercely, "Then why didn't you warn us?!"
"What would you-excuse me-what could you have done about it? I tried but you just didn't get it!" she answered, "And you two," she gestured at Hiei and Sesshomaru, "I had to think of myself first, so I couldn't tell you."
They all sat down and sighed.
"Aieka," Sesshomaru said, "There is something we need to say before we think of how we're going to get out of here."
"Yeah?" she asked.
Everyone turned to look at her.
"Aieka," they said together, "Your boyfriend is an overprotective psycho."
She smiled, "Yes, I know. That's what makes him so attractive."
They all stared at her.
Yume leaned over to the two men, "I can see why they were meant for each other."
They nodded.
"Oh yeah…" Aieka asked, "Why did you rescue us?"
"Because," Hiei started, "We figured we would be caught by Rio eventually and we would give you to him in exchange for the opportunity to escape a horrible and painful death accompanied by annoying and degrading mockery. You know, we were going to trade you like…like when a gecko detaches it's tail to escape a hungry bird…"
Everyone gave him a blank stare.
"Rio couldn't be that bad…" Yume said.
Aieka gave her a disturbed look and shook her head, "You don't want to know…"
Then Yume leaned over and hugged Sesshomaru, "Poor you, Aieka! You and your psycho boyfriend! But I know Sesshy saved me because he loves me!"
"What did she call you…?" Hiei asked Sesshomaru, looking disturbed.
Sesshomaru gave him a confused look and shrugged, "I try to ignore her," then he tried to pry her off, "Actually, you were an accident…but I guess you can be used as a shield…"
Yume didn't seem to hear him, "Did I tell you what our children's names are going to be? We'll have five…"
"Oh God…" Aieka whimpered.
- - -
Sometime between the fifth and sixth lap around the mansion, Rio sensed that, somehow, Aieka and Yume had disappeared after they ran around the house. They had escaped. He turned around and started to walk back to the front door. She'll probably be in hiding until dinner. I'll let them think they got away…for now. Besides, they've probably got my point.
- - -
Aieka crept into the kitchen. Oddly enough, Rio wasn't there. Hiei had finally sensed that Rio had "given up" on trying to find them. (But only after they had to endure what felt like hours of Yume's plans for the future.)
She opened a cupboard. I need something easy to cook… She went into the pantry.
No ramen… No ramen… No ramen, no ramen, no ramen, No Ramen! HOW CAN YOU HAVE A PANTRY WITH NO RAMEN?!?!?! Aieka ran back into the kitchen and opened up cupboard, after cupboard, after cupboard.
She paused, "Wait… I smell some nearby…"
Aieka opened up the second pantry; but it was empty.
"Why…? Where the hell is all the friggin' ramen around here?!" she paused, "Wait… Ben has been here… The bastard…"
- - -
Baka put the last package of Ramen in the box.
"They think they can mock me just because I'm not a demon," he mumbled, "But I'll show them… I'll fuck them up! I shall have the last laugh! I'll have possession of all the ramen in the world!!! …or at least all the ramen in this house…I shall be victorious!!!"
He shut the box and laughed as he stood.
"It's mine!!! It's mine, you hear?! All the ramen is under my control!!!"
"What did you say? The ramen is under whose control…?" someone said behind him.
Ben turned and saw a dark figure in the doorway, light streaming in behind them.
"Aieka…? How did you-?!"
Aieka stepped forward and Baka stood defensively in front of the giant ramen box.
"Shut up!" she yelled, sword drawn, "Just give me the ramen and no one gets hurt…"
"NO! It shall never be yours!"
"Silence, fool! You don't need it anywhere near as much as me! This is a matter of life and death!"
Ben's eyes narrowed, "What are you talking about? Ramen is not a matter of life and death, bitch."
"My life, or your death, you dirty whore!"
Then Ben took a step back and tripped, his butt landing hard on the precious ramen.
"NOOOOOOO!!!!!" Aieka screamed as she heard the ramen crunch.
She sheathed her sword and tried to shove Baka off the box futilely; even with all of her Spirit Energy behind the shove, she couldn't budge him.
"Oww! My ass!" he moaned as he rolled off the box.
"No one cares about your ass! It could survive a nuclear explosion along with the roaches and Twinkies; it's the ramen I care about… What in seven hells is wrong with you?! MOVE YOUR FAT ASS!!!"
Aieka and Baka opened the box. Aieka picked up a package. The precious noodles had been reduced to powder. Not even the seasoning packet survived.
"My…precious…" she whimpered.
She threw it back into the box and turned slowly, giving Ben the worst death glare she had ever glared in the history of death glares. Ben's fat twitched.
"How…dare you!!!" Aieka screeched, drawing her sword again, "I needed that ramen!!! Now it's ALL GONE!!!"
"That was only half the ramen," Baka said, "Chris has the other half."
"Really? And how is this going to help you?"
"He will hide it from you! But if you let me live…"
"He has the ramen…?" Aieka asked, "Hn… Then he's going to come back… Too bad for him then…"
Aieka raised her sword and struck Baka on the back of the head, laughing manically.
- - -
Chris walked into the basement and looked around as his eyes adjusted to the almost pitch black room.
"Ben? I hid the rest of the ramen, where are you?"
He stepped, unconsciously, onto a giant painted "X" on the floor. Then he saw Aieka standing at the edge of the X.
"Aieka?! Why are you here?! Where's Ben?"
Aieka pointed her sword at him, "Just give me your share of the damn ramen and you and Ben might survive."
Chris turned to run.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Aieka warned, "You have no idea how much danger you're in right now."
Chris stopped and noticed the X.
"Look up, you dumb shit." Aieka ordered.
Chris stared up in horror as he stared at Ben who was tied to the piping on the ceiling. The pipes groaned with the weight of their burden. Then he blinked.
"Aieka?"
"Yeah, loser?"
"How did you get those ropes to hold him up there?"
Aieka looked up as the pipes screamed, "Umm…good question…I'm not really sure how they've been able to hold him up there so long…"
Then the ropes began snap and their sense of preservation kicked in. Their argument forgotten, Aieka sheathed her sword and began to sprint to the exit.
"RUN, YOU WORTHLESS BASTARD!!!" she screamed, "RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!"
Aieka passed Chris easily and was halfway to the basement stairs. The ropes continued to unravel and snap. Chris dared a look up just as the last rope snapped and Ben fell. Chris didn't make it. His final scream was smothered by the earth shaking "BOOM!" that shook the house and it's grounds. He was incased in layers of ass fat. Aieka didn't stop until she ran straight into Rio at top of the stairs. He caught her by the front of her shirt and stood her back on her feet when she almost fell backwards back down the stairs.
But he didn't let go.
Their faces were about two inches apart and Rio stared unnervingly into her panicked eyes.
Aieka laughed nervously, "H-hi, Rio… What's up? Hehe…" she cringed. "Don't hurt me…!"
He smirked evilly and let her go. Sesshomaru, Hiei, Yume, Kurama, Touya, and Aoshi came down from upstairs to find the source of the tremor. Sesshomaru, Hiei, and Yume came to an immediate halt when they saw Rio. Rio and Aieka moved out of the others' way so they could look downstairs. No one went down. They looked at Aieka and Rio. Rio shrugged, but Aieka didn't twitch, her full attention captured by Rio.
"Don't look so scared," Rio said to her in his velvet voice, "It doesn't suit you."
She calmed down, or at least made herself look calm for everyone. She started walking over to where the others were, (More importantly, away from HIM!), but apparently Rio wasn't finished.
"You know I won't hurt you…unless you want me to…" then he smiled that dangerous smile, "And if I did, I bet you'd like it."
Aieka stumbled, but didn't fall. She stood with her back to him and her right eye started twitching. She looked very disturbed. Everyone else's eyes got big and they looked from Aieka, to Rio, to Aieka, to Rio, and then back to Aieka. Rio just started walking away.
"See you later, Aieka!"
Then he walked around the corner and out of sight.
Sesshomaru was staring at her with his head cocked to the side with a look that couldn't be interpreted. Hiei was looking at the ground with a "I'm-not-going-to-say-a-word" look on his face. Yume's eyes were big and it looked like she was trying hard not to laugh. Kurama looked shocked. Touya looked like he was trying to act indifferent, but failing. And Aoshi was all-too-thoroughly inspecting a vase on the corner table, trying to ignore the situation but still trying to suppress a smile. Aieka saw all of this and glared at them.
"It is NOT what it seems! Shut up," she growled, "He said that just to make you THINK that!"
Yume edged over to her, "Wow, so you two have already gotten back to doing that, huh? Banging so hard the whole house shook, wow. Didn't waste any time at all gettin' it on…"
"Shut up, okay! Just shut up! It's not what it seems! SHUT UP, YUME!!!"
Yume jumped back to the line looking pleased with being a pest.
"I hate you…" Aieka mumbled as she walked to the kitchen, "You can all burn in hell!"
- - -
Everyone sat at the table for lunch eating beef stew and breadsticks which Aieka was able to throw together only thirty minutes late. No one complained, but that might have been because Aieka was in a particularly hostile mood and that Chris had been found crushed between two skin flaps of an unconscious Ben in a very strange position next to a box of powdered ramen in the warehouse section of the basement under the stairs. No one dared think of how such a thing had happened. Neither of the two had woken up yet. Chris was taken to the clinic in another section of the mansion and, because no one could lift him or just didn't want to, Ben was left in the basement.
Yume finally couldn't take the silence any longer. She picked up a breadstick, stood up, and held it high in the air.
"Penis!"
Everyone froze. Aieka dropped her spoon into her bowl and just stared at Yume with a look of shear dismay. Then Yume sat down and kept eating her soup like nothing happened.
"What…the hell…was that…?!" Aieka whispered, her right eye twitching again.
Then Aishi screamed, "How could you say such a horrible word?! And at the dinner table?!"
Yume looked at her with an innocent smile, "What? Do my words offend you?"
"You said-" Aishi leaned over and her voice dropped to a barely audible level, "-penis."
"What about a penis?" Yume asked loudly.
She covered her ears, "Don't say that!!!"
Then she ran away.
Everyone just stared on, disturbed.
Aieka cleared her throat, "Well, that was…nothing short of disturbing…and completely random… Thank you, Yume. I'll never be able to look at breadsticks the same again."
Yume poked at one, "It's a penis in disguise…" then she took a bite of it, "No wonder they're so delicious…"
Kikyo stopped chewing on hers and just put it down on her plate and spat the rest into a napkin.
"No dick for me, thank you." she whispered.
Touya and Shizuka, one seated on either side of Kikyo, looked at her oddly, and then scooted away from her a bit.
Aieka just smiled and shook her head and leaned back in her chair, sipping her wine. Yume sat in her chair, looking happy with her work. The others just sat, still in shock, with that disturbed look stuck on their faces.
Yume smiled, feeling good she accomplished to disturb everyone. She then looked to the side of her, to see Toya, sort of smiling and looking at her. She turned away and was changing at least five different shades of red.
Oi, why do I keep looking at him? I only like Sesshomaru. But … She shook her head a little, and tried to feel happy again, for the "disturbance" she caused. She smiled and kept eating her bread sticks, with Toya still in the back of her mind. Then she picked up the breadbasket.
"Penis, anyone?"
- - -
"Yume, where are you?" Toya shouted as he walked through the forest.
They were playing a little game of hide and seek, but with a different outcome.
"I know where you are, little Yume." he said, spotting a part of her dress behind a tree.
He ran to it, but it was just the cloth. He looked around, getting a little nervous. Suddenly, something tackled him from the back.
"I found you." Yume said while laying on top of him, straddling his waist, "You know, I was the one looking for you, not the other way around." she said with a smile, putting his hands on her hips, "I was getting bored, you know I never had too much patience." she said leaning down, making their faces only inches away, looking into his eyes seductively.
"I know. But be careful with that little habit, it can cause something bad to happen later. Or maybe something good could happen now." he said pulling her body closer to his, then kissed her deeply on the lips.
- - -
Aieka stood in the courtyard at midnight, waiting. Rio had caught her in the kitchen, as Aieka expected he would, and made her promise she would meet him in the courtyard around midnight. Aieka figured it would be better to meet him after a few hours so he would be a little calmer, even though Rio did have the worst habit of holding grudges, but her odds would be better…maybe…hopefully…oh fuck it! She was going to have to face him either way and either way she was screwed so better to just handle the matter as privately as possible.
He walked over to her from the shrub maze. They were in the rose section of the inner courtyard's garden. The scents of the many colored roses were intoxicating, but wonderful. Aieka stood by a huge wooden structure with black climbing roses growing thick on it, weaving around the cross-hatching beams.
"So," she said, "I suppose you want to rant about how I can't look at an men except you and how I disobeyed you and all that crap?"
Rio closed his eyes for a moment before he breathed deeply and opened them again, his almost black eyes reflecting silver light from the moon, making them look even more like they contained a whole night within them themselves.
"You really pissed me off this morning," he said quietly, "What do you have to say about that?"
Well, it seems death had given him a bit more patience.
"You know as well as anyone nothing happened…" she paused and then breathed deeply for the nest part, "A lot's happened since you walked away from me that day… Almost four hundred years worth of shit. It's hard for me to just drop all of what I've become to just take you back. I abandoned my life for you once, Rio, and I came up short."
"I couldn't help that, Aieka. I died. What do you want from me?!"
"I almost killed myself to be with you, Rio!" Aieka yelled at him, "When I said I would give up anything to be with you, I meant that literally! I was willing to die to be with you! I waited for you like you told me to when you left and when you didn't come back to the Ice World for two years, I went back to the Kuro Ryuu to wait there. A year later, I find out you died. Do you know what that did to me, Rio?! It was…! It killed me inside. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep, I didn't do anything. I went catatonic, basically. I was there physically, but my mind was in hell. When I heard you died, I lost everything. Then, five years later, I tried to kill myself. Someone stopped me from doing that, but I was never the same.
"I moved on, but you were always in the back of my mind, always pulling at the little bit of sanity I had pieced together, always keeping me from letting what happened go. Then I died and was reincarnated and, now that I think about it, you were still there in my mind. I still felt some painful memory in the back of my mind that I couldn't fully remember. I died and you still plagued me."
He listened in silence while she ranted. Aieka stared at him for a while after she finished, and then sighed, everything spent for the time being.
When he didn't say anything, she continued, but in a more subdued tone, "The worst part, the part that kept me holding on to you like I did, was what you had said before you left. You promised me, Rio. You had promised me you would come back and you told me I had to wait for you."
"I know," he said, "I was so sure of myself when I left. I really fucked everything up with that. But hey," he reached out and put a hand on her arm, "I'm here now."
"Yeah, because of Naraku."
"You forgive me?" he asked.
Aieka was quiet for a long time, but it didn't matter. When you're dead, time is all you have. Then she gave him a quick kiss, then started back to the mansion, "You're good, Rio, but not that good; you still ruined a big part of my life. You want me, you have to earn you're way into my favor like every other poor hopeless guy to ever fall for me. The way I see things here, we're all getting a chance to start over. To begin again. Well, let's…begin again."
