"Why didn't you tell me?" Michi whispered into the quiet.
In the confines of Taki's dark room, even her hushed words reverberated with the grating intensity of a shout. The white threads were everywhere, snaking insidious filaments through the mottled complexity of Taki's Loom, twining through black rage and mauve sadness and pink regret. Like forking lightning, they thrashed pervasively, blinding in their purity.
At her back, Genkai shuffled. "Tell you what?"
"That he's—" Her voice failed her, and she spread her trembling hands, helpless to explain.
"What do you see?"
"The white threads… They've spread." A description that did precisely no justice to the virulent threads writhing against her territory.
In the corner, Taki ceased rocking in place. His hands, once curled protectively over the back of his head, thudded into his lap, and his dull gaze flitted toward the door, drawn toward their stilted conversation. A feverish intensity gleamed in the gray depths of his eyes as his focus flicked and darted and strayed. To Genkai. To Michi. To his fists, covered in rocky stoneskin. Back to Michi. And on and on.
Even when he spoke, voice as rough as a landslide, he couldn't maintain eye contact with Michi for more than a moment. "Miss Kuroki?"
Her heart cracked near in two at the fear caught in the syllables of her surname, thrumming like an undertow dragging Taki below the waves. But it wasn't his terror that stirred her into motion—it was the hope nestled there, too, caught snug beside the fear.
A faith that she would help him. A faith that she would fix him.
A faith she hadn't earned.
Yet in the face of that trust, unfounded or not, she had to try. Never mind how woefully out of her depth she might be.
And so, step by step, she advanced into the room's gloomy interior, urging one foot in front of the other, ignoring the skittering nerves jumping in her pulse, the panic surging in the drumming beat of her headache. Her territory was screaming, protesting her every movement, pleading that she turn back, roaring—deep in her bones—that this was wrong.
That Taki was wrong.
But she refused to be swayed. He needed her, so she would be there for him. The end. No arguments allowed.
"Hey, Taki," she murmured as she reached him, proud no tremor found its way past her lips. Legs folding beneath her, she sank carefully to the floor and extended a steady hand.
His stoneskin was coarse and unforgiving beneath her palm.
The soft padding of slippered footsteps drew her attention back over her shoulder, and she found Genkai a few feet to her left, watching with critical eyes—ready in case something went awry. There was a certain comfort in the old woman's posture, in the tension hidden in her lean muscles, in the way she appeared ready to spring, like the hammer of a gun ready to fall.
Intervention—safety—just a heartbeat away.
Unnecessary, but comforting nonetheless.
Turning back to Taki, Michi offered a smile and gently squeezed his hand. He dwarfed her so thoroughly that her fingers gripped little more than the heel of his palm, and combined with how minutely his rocky flesh gave beneath hers, the gesture was rendered practically meaningless.
Yet, even as she withdrew, his breath hitched, catching in his throat.
"I'm here," she said. "Talk to me. What's going on?"
Such a useless question. So mundane. So commonplace. As if she'd bumped into him at the corner store rather than discovered him here, falling apart at the very seams.
But, by the same token, maybe that was what he needed. After all, how isolated had he been these last weeks tucked away in the mountains, far from the friends he'd made, the life he'd carved out? How lonely must that have been?
For all Michi's jokes about hell camp and sadistic training, Genkai wasn't a cruel teacher. Not at her heart. Beneath her gruff growls and cutting honesty hid a woman who cared for her charges. Deeply and without reservation.
But she wasn't warm. She wasn't comforting.
Maybe that was what Taki needed. Someone to listen. Someone to hear him. Someone to see him in the way that Michi was uniquely equipped to manage.
"I hate it," Take grunted, his stoneskin creaking as he straightened to his full height, his torso unfurling.
The surge of black across his Loom nearly made her afraid to seek clarification. "Hate what?"
His answer came as a snarl, as unflinchingly vicious as anything she'd ever heard. A noise that raised the hairs across the back of her neck. One so cold-blooded and enraged it made even Hiei at his most caustic appear cuddly.
"Everything. I have everything, Miss Kuroki. This world. The sunlight. These mountains. Me. You."
In the uneasy silence following that pronouncement, Genkai strode closer. At once, Taki stiffened, his eyeteeth flashing as he growled. Heeding his warning, Genkai went still.
"Michi."
That was all Genkai offered. A single word with a million meanings.
Worry rang chief among them, echoed in the mustard in her threads, and right on its heels, a stern command. One that said it was time to step back. To clear out before danger found her. To leave Taki in Genkai's calloused, capable hands.
Michi ignored all that.
"Can we have some privacy, please? Taki and I?"
"Now's not the time—"
Unbidden, Michi's left hand rose to her temple, rubbing soothing circles into the tension knotted there. Gritting her teeth, she twisted to face Genkai, begging with every fiber of her being for the woman to give her this chance.
When she'd first discovered the white in Taki's Loom, she'd thought he needed Genkai. She'd been convinced his troubles were far behind anything she could handle. And maybe that was still true. Maybe she was meddling in issues too complex for her rudimentary knowledge of the arcane to combat.
But if she could help—in any capacity—wasn't she obligated to give it a shot?
And if Genkai was serious about Michi mastering her territory, oughtn't she trust Michi to try?
It seemed Genkai understood those unsaid questions, and a flicker of understanding softened the hard jut of her chin. The signature navy of her stubborn determination gave way to a lavender Michi might've called affection under different circumstances.
Now, it almost struck of respect.
"You've got fifteen minutes." And, left unspoken, hung the rest of her sentiment. She wouldn't go far. Perhaps no farther than the corridor itself. If disaster reared its ugly head, she'd be there.
Michi responded in kind, half her answer delivered in silence. "Thank you." The wordless dip of her head communicated the rest. That she appreciated the backup, but it wouldn't be needed.
Then, lips set in a grimace, Genkai retreated to the hall. Only once the door clattered closed did Michi turn back to Taki. She found him unchanged, stoneskin still hard as granite, Loom sparking with rage as black as a starless night. Staring down the monster in his eyes, she summoned her kindest, softest smile—one to put Shuichi's gentle manner to shame—and reached for the demon's hand once more. "Tell me why you're angry. Tell me all of it. Every last, petty detail."
For a moment, it seemed he wouldn't. He sat still as the stone from which his flesh was carved, hardly even breathing. Rigid. Unyielding. Entirely closed off.
But then his jaws parted with an audible click. He began to talk. And once he started, he didn't or wouldn't—or couldn't—stop.
Fifteen minutes quickly became thirty. Then sixty. And as early morning bled toward noon, Genkai's interruptions grew ever more infrequent, until, at last, the harsh thunking of her knuckles on the doorjamb ceased entirely.
All the while, Taki spoke.
About his anger, first. The deep-seated rage that smoldered in his gut at every turn. An ire that hissed dark thoughts in his mind, that told him he hated living amongst humans, that insisted he detested his mundane construction job, that decreed the kiss of Human World sunlight too vile to be tolerated. A sick, twisted wrath that professed his own soul weak and wretched and unworthy.
A fury that was tearing him apart. Piece by bloody piece. Day by horrid day.
Then, when even that insurmountable anger had burned down to coals, he spoke of the rest. The seething mire of emotions that had wracked him for days. Despair that he'd never see Demon World again. Bitterness that he'd ever agreed to come here. Irritation with Genkai and Ryota and every other soul tied to the halfway house.
Souls like Michi.
Only when his voice began to fail, his throat gone hoarse, did he touch on the confusion. In broken, wavering whispers, he revealed that those thoughts weren't his, that he loved this world. Or, at least, he thought he did.
He certainly had—once.
But he couldn't recall when that had been. Recently, surely. And yet when?
No matter how hard he tried, how deep he dug, those memories slipped away from him, recollections of happiness escaping his grasp as if they were no more than fog swirling between his fingers.
Michi listened to every word, silent and emotive in equal measure, responding as he needed, when he needed. Providing the ear he so desperately sought.
Through it all, she studied his threads. Even as she squeezed his hand, his stoneskin long since reverted to soft flesh, she catalogued and processed and analyzed. Not even the thundering headache clamoring behind her eyes could deter her.
The thrashing black had faded. Not entirely, but enough to make out the rest of his Loom more clearly. All that tangled crimson and rust and mauve and pink. A tapestry of hurt and pain and loneliness.
In the end, though, it was neither Taki's words nor his threads that put ice in her heart. And as she helped him into bed and tucked his hulking frame beneath his quilt, it was all she could do to keep from crying.
Because beneath all those writhing colors, his core waited.
Woven through it like the stain of toxic bleach ran thick ropes of vile white. A corruption so wrong, so wicked, she could hardly stand to look at it. A brokenness that threatened to break her in turn, to render her shattered and quivering and near catatonic right there at Taki's bedside.
Ultimately, she couldn't stave off tears forever, and once Taki's breathing dropped to the slow pace of deep sleep, the fervor with which he'd spoken having exhausted him despite the noonday sunlight beyond his curtains, she stumbled into the hall. No sooner had the door closed than sobs seized her, hard and fast and unrelenting, sending her crashing to the floor, her kneecaps smarting, the world spinning.
Genkai closed on her instantly, wrapping a wiry arm around Michi's waist, hauling her upright, anchoring her when her knees threatened to upend her once more. A heartbeat later, Asato appeared, fear threaded through his Loom in splotches of forest green. His arms encircled her, and her cheek found his shoulder, her tears soaking into his shirt.
But even still, even with the calming tenor of his voice in her ear, the sobs just kept coming.
It took nearly twenty minutes for Michi to grow steady enough to dare sip the cup of tea Ryota had kindly offered her. By the time she'd processed that the glass had come from him, he'd already ghosted away, dark eyes and lithe frame melding into the shadowed hallway. Now, seated at the kitchen table, feet drawn up onto her chair, knees pressed to her chest, she tried not to think about what she must have looked like. Bloodshot, swollen eyes. Smeared mascara. Red, puffy cheeks.
She'd always been an ugly crier.
No reason to think the after effects of today's meltdown would prove any different.
Across the room, Genkai paced like a restless beast, her hands clenched at the small of her back. Michi's recovery had worn her patience thin, and her exasperation stretched taut in glittering threads of crimson and goldenrod.
But it was Asato, leaning against the counter, arms crossed over his narrow chest, who broke the uneasy quiet. "Ready to explain, Weaver?"
She swallowed a pitiful sip of tepid tea and tried in vain to seize upon the right explanation, but whatever that justification was—if it existed at all—evaded her, and she settled instead for a whispered, "I'm sorry." She jerked her mug toward Taki's distant room. "About all that."
"Why the waterworks, Kuroki?"
Faltering and uncertain, the story tumbled forth. A recounting of Taki's emotions, raw and unfiltered. A report of his snarled threads. And finally, in a ragged murmur, a description of his core, white and broken and bone-chillingly perverse.
At those last words, Genkai ground to a half, stalling out like a car puttering out of gas. "Is that what you noticed earlier? When you said the white had spread."
Michi shook her head. "I didn't see it until the end. His Loom was too hectic before that. It obscured his core." Or she hadn't wanted to see that treacherous white. Perhaps she'd blocked it out, willfully and childishly ignoring that which she could not comprehend.
Which option was worse?
She couldn't be sure.
Asato heaved a sigh. "What I'm hearing is that he doesn't want to be here. That he wants to return to Demon World. We can arrange—"
Michi cut him off. "No. He made it clear he doesn't want that. Not truly. That's why he's confused. He can't make sense of it. Of why he's so…" She trailed off, uncertain how to conclude.
"Unhappy," Asato supplied.
She shrugged. It was as good a word as any. After all, Michi doubted any mere phrase could capture the depth of Taki's pain. Words lacked the needed clarity, the extent of feeling only his Loom could convey.
"You haven't explained the fit you threw," Genkai said flatly. Her tone brooked no deflection. She wanted answers, and she would have them.
Even if they weren't answers Michi knew how to give.
"The white… hurts," she said slowly, striving for some semblance of an explanation. "It feels like it's shredding my territory in half. Or like it's trying to suck me in and ruin me, too." Biting the inside of her cheek, she jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes, desperate to seal out the Loom of Life for one precious second. "I couldn't stand it. I couldn't—"
A new sob bottled up whatever else she might have tried to say, but before tears could claim her in full, a quiet cough drew her attention to the doorway. Ryota stood on the threshold, hooded gaze somber, shoulders slumped, a battered rucksack in hand.
He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, looking first at Genkai before his dark eyes honed in on Michi. "Our train leaves in forty minutes, right?" Then, nervously, the mustard in his threads indicating his dread at the response he anticipated, he added, "Unless we're delayed again."
Genkai huffed. "No, it's time." She gestured Michi onto her feet with a jerk of her wrist. "Get up, Kuroki. We've a transfer to complete."
The train to Itomori was an old, rattling contraption, nothing like the streamlined vessel that had carried Michi and Asato out to Genkai's shrine. As it jarred and lurched down the rails, she ached to pull her phone and earbuds from her bag and fit them into her ears, sealing out the world behind a crush of soundtracks and movie scores, but with Ryota seated at her side, hiding wasn't an option.
Her one reprieve was the relative emptiness of their compartment. Out here, deep in the mountains, the railcar was all but deserted. Compared to the blinding intensity of the Mushiyori subway, the colors here—composed only of Ryota's Loom and that of a wizened old man four rows up from them—were easy enough to stomach. Or they would have been, if she weren't still reeling from the onslaught of Taki's riotous hurt.
This ride was a short one, a mere thirty minutes, but filling the silence seemed an almost insurmountable task.
Eventually, Ryota summoned words where she could not. "Will he recover?"
Michi's breath stuttered in her lungs. "Taki?"
"Yes."
"I… don't know. I hope so."
Ryota nodded, chin bobbing. His dark eyes were locked directly forward, the stark overhead lighting creating deep shadows beneath his heavy brow. Everything about him seemed cloaked in darkness, like he existed in a plane stuck in perpetual twilight. His dusky skin was made bleaker still by a grayish undertone, and his hair fell in a black curtain, further obscuring his coal-dark eyes.
Dark on dark on dark.
That was Ryota.
Thoroughly out of place on a train in remote Japan. And no doubt further out of place still in Itomori's quiet streets.
But he remained as gentle and reserved as she'd anticipated from his file. Given enough time—of which he'd have plenty in a town as sleepy as Itomori—that disposition would ingratiate him to the locals. He'd fit in, even if his appearance didn't.
Once upon a time, she'd been sure of the same regarding Taki, and for nearly three years, she'd been right. He'd lived a happy, contented life in the midst of a bustling human city, at home despite the strangeness of it all—the unbelievable absurdity of a demon living amongst humans as if he were one of them.
Now, that might all be behind him. If Genkai couldn't make sense of what was happening to his Loom, Taki may never be permitted to return to his cozy apartment in Sarayashiki. Unpredictability was a problem the halfway house couldn't be lenient on. Spirit World governance wouldn't allow it. The success of the transplant program thus far was predicated on the confidence with which Genkai could forecast the behavior of their transfers. Unsettled as he was, Taki was an unknown.
And unknowns couldn't be trusted. Not when hundreds—if not thousands—of human lives were at stake.
"You are not a good liar, Miss Kuroki," Ryota said, voice soft as the beating of a bird's wings. He glanced at her sidelong, those pitch-dark eyes appraising and evaluating, seeing more than he'd first let on. In his threads, she spotted flecks of emerald curiosity, but the navy of determination was more prominent.
And a dash of mossy anticipation, too, for good measure.
Her eyes shuttering against the bright colors of his Loom, she pinched her nose and willed away the dredges of her headache. "Please, call me Michi. No need for formalities."
"Taki calls you—"
"Taki is stubborn." She rolled her head to the side, gifting him with a smile she managed to yank to her lips. "Michi will do." Then she hesitated. Her fingers knotted in the hem of her shirt. "Did you speak with him often? Taki, I mean."
"A bit in the beginning. He spoke highly of you." The demon's mouth bowed into a frown. His somber features grew more clouded still. "Less so in recent weeks. He became withdrawn. Sullen."
Much like she'd seen him today. A shell of the kindly creature he once was.
She needed a change of subject. Something that wasn't Taki. Something that didn't make her heart feel as though it were cracking in two. "I'm sorry about the delay. I hope the wait wasn't unbearable."
Ryota's gaze returned forward. "I enjoyed it. This world is much as Hiei had promised. Light. Airy." A crease furrowed across his brow as he searched for his next words. "It's alive. And… bright."
Oh, it was bright.
Bright as the sun. Bright enough to leave her reeling. Bright and blinding and inescapably awash in color.
But then again, Ryota wasn't talking about the Loom of Life.
"How does Demon World differ?"
Ryota fidgeted, his placid calm breaking for the first time. "I don't mean to disparage my home, Miss— Michi. I'm sure I will always miss the village where I grew up. But Demon World is a harsh place. Ruled by power and strength and blood. For those of us too weak to keep up, there are few havens."
Michi shivered, a cold seeping deep into her bones. She rubbed her arms, stiff fingers gliding over tense gooseflesh. If Ryota noticed her disquiet, he gave no indication.
In her time shepherding apparitions into new lives, she'd gathered as much as he'd said about the harsh nature of his home world, but no matter how many tales of Demon World's brutality she heard, the sickening unease that woke in her belly never seemed to lessen. She couldn't imagine an existence in which every day was truly life or death, a reality in which the ability to kill more efficiently than your neighbor was the only think keeping you alive.
In light of an upbringing like that, she could almost forgive Hiei his rough edges.
After a beat, Ryota continued, "The colors at home are different. Duller. More irregular. Our forests are not so vibrant." He glanced beyond the window to her left, studying the foliage blurring past. The trees had gone scarlet and gold with the season, their leaves spiraling to the forest floor on a steady breeze. "I think I like that difference most."
"Is that what Hiei promised you? The colors?"
"Yes. And no. Mostly, he spoke of sprawling cities where humans clamor and mill and thrive in calamitous harmony. But he also talked of remote villages where people resided their entire lives, never once leaving, forever surrounded by family, by their offspring and their offspring's offspring. That's what I want. A life that stable… A future already foretold."
A reasonable desire considering the ruthlessness with which his old life had been torn from him.
But what he described… It wasn't what she'd expected of Hiei. In all their encounters, he'd always treated her—and her world at large—with nothing short of disgust. Maybe, though, she hadn't given him enough credit. Maybe she hadn't tried to see beyond what she'd wanted to see, the image of a vicious, brutish demon she'd first envisioned when Asato told her of the three planes. He'd been precisely what she'd anticipated his kind to be like, and despite the plethora of benign demons she'd met since—never mind lovely Yukina, who she'd actually become acquainted with first—she'd clung to that rough exterior he portrayed.
Sometimes, Hiei's ire felt like one of her few justifications for how desperately she wanted free of her territory.
Other days, like this wretched one, validation abounded.
But now, listening to the wonder in Ryota's voice and the reverence with which he invoked Hiei's name, she wondered just how grave an injustice she'd done the prickly fire demon.
Without meaning to, she asked a question that would have left Asato dumbfounded. "Have you met any of the other Spirit Detectives? Or, I suppose, the former Detectives?"
Ryota blinked owlish eyes at her, as if startled from a trance. "No. They wouldn't know me, but I know of them. Most demons do." For the first time since she'd met him, exuberance lit in Ryota's features, the barest ghost of a smile flitting about his lips. Teal happiness wormed through his Loom, chased by ice blue pride, and he twisted to face her, his knees knocking against hers. "I've actually seen them though. From a distance only. Up on jumbotrons. But in person, nonetheless."
She ignored the jumping beat of her heart, striving for an even tone. "Oh?"
"I attended the first Demon World Tournament. It was an honor to witness." As he paused, seemingly gathering his thoughts, she swallowed down an unintended sigh. Just when she thought all of demonkind might not be comprised of malicious brutes, even one of the gentlest apparitions she'd encountered so far started singing the praises of violence. "Urameshi, Hiei, and Kurama all fought there. Their combat skills are legend. It was a marvel to behold."
Combat skills. Marvels. All bloodthirsty nonsense.
But there were useful bits to be gleaned between if she were willing to listen.
Urameshi meant Yusuke. And Hiei she knew all too well. But there was that other name again. Kurama. It shouldn't have surprised her. After all, she knew he'd been one of the Detectives. But its resurfacing still rankled at her.
Perhaps now was her chance to gather more pieces.
"Kurama?" she asked as the train wheezed around a bend in the tracks. Far ahead, visible only for a moment before the shifting angles cut it out of view, Itomori station flickered between the trees. "Which one is that?"
"Yoko Kurama. He's an infamous thief, renowned for his heists. A fox demon."
She startled. Her pulse drummed behind her eyes, her headache reawakening as she puzzled over the awe laced through Ryota's Loom. "A fox?"
His answer came as a wordless nod, and before she could press further, the train churned into the station, clattering to a graceless halt. In moments, the opportunity to dig deeper slipped away, left behind in the near-empty compartment as they deboarded and stepped into the afternoon sunlight.
A dirt road lay along the tracks, winding and wooded, and the golden light of lazy autumn afternoons filtered through the trees, dappling them both in warm, buttery yellow. Yet even here, in a forest so clearly alive, Ryota seemed more a shade of a person than a living soul.
An ache opened in her chest as she wondered whether he'd always been this way—or if it was a product of the war that had ruined his home.
How did one recover from that sort of hurt?
She hoped, however vainly, that a new life here might be a first step, that Hiei of all people had set Ryota on a path toward healing.
Still, even with her thoughts scattered, as she oriented herself and gestured Ryota to follow in her wake, Ryota's silent affirmation on the train kept niggling at her.
A fox.
Why did that seem so familiar?
AN: Next chapter, we'll return to interactions with the gang (including a female face we haven't seen before!), but I hope this interlude out at Genkai's shrine was enjoyable. Lots of plotty bits are at work here, and of course, more Kurama hints. I have far too much fun laying out breadcrumbs Michi doesn't know how to fit together.
HUGE thanks to everyone who reviewed this past week: La Femme Absurde, Guest, CrystalVixen93, o-dragon, Aria2302, ahyeon, KitsuneWho, and Star Charter! I adore you all!