Chapter Ten
Shadows peeled open Muraki's pentagram like knives twitching back the skins of an onion. The layers of amethyst light folded back with a sound that shivered glass, and then Muraki and Tatsumi were both lost in the storm of darkness.
Watari raised her head from behind the sofa, then ducked as a loose tendril of shadow nearly trimmed her hair. "Tsuzuki!" she screamed. "Call Suzaku! Or Byakko! Or something!"
Tsuzuki was paralysed with if/then and if/if not and but-what-if-I contradictions. He didn't actually want Muraki torn to bits. He couldn't risk Tatsumi being hurt. The darkness seemed to avoid him, leaving him in a bubble of comparative light, as though a single sunbeam was striking down on him.
Hisoka had dived for cover with the fall of the hydra creature. He didn't need any sort of empathy or psychometry to tell him that things were going badly wrong. "Tsuzuki!" he called towards the hesitating shinigami. "Take cover, idiot!" The demon's malice was like a second wind in the air beside the purely physical; it rasped over his skin in a thousand tiny poisonous grains of frost, as far beyond human as it was beyond compassion.
---
Time stretched out around Tsuzuki in a long moment, and all he could think was, no.
He would not tolerate this.
No, because Tatsumi had always cared for him and tried to help, and even the times that he had drawn back because he couldn't carry Tsuzuki's sorrows for him and couldn't stop his tears were, in the end, because he'd cared, for otherwise they would never have touched him.
No, because the creature had intended Hisoka's death or worse, had tried to kill Watari, had done everything he could to hurt and harm and destroy.
No, because even Muraki, and whatever mixture of fear and desire and loathing and need he felt for the man didn't matter now, even Muraki had tried to protect him, and had tried to spare Tatsumi's life rather than killing him on sight, and even if the psychopathic doctor deserved death for some of the things he had done -- even then -- he didn't deserve the creature's malice and pain. Nobody did. Death should be enough to settle all accounts.
(And that might have meant something to him, if he had bothered to think about it any further, and considered the fundamental difference between two descendants of darkness, but time was running out, and the thought slipped from his mind like quicksilver and was gone.)
No. No more. Not even if this body died for it.
"Tatsumi!" he called, and walked into the darkness.
It parted in front of him like the bow crest of a wave, washing back to show Tatsumi standing over the body of Muraki. The doctor lay in a crumpled heap on the ground, his yukata in rags, red lines traced across his body with inhuman precision. Tatsumi held Muraki's glasses in his right hand. As he turned to face Tsuzuki, he twisted the wire frames between his fingers and smiled as the glass of the lenses shattered into sparkling black-threaded dust.
"Tsuzuki." The deep voice was as familiar as it had always been. "You shouldn't have run away like that. I'm very annoyed with you."
"I wouldn't run away from Tatsumi," Tsuzuki replied. His words were flat, angry, paid out like a miser's coinage. "Get out of him. Now. I will not tolerate this."
Tatsumi laughed. He reached out with his free hand towards Tsuzuki's cheek -- and then the gesture stopped halfway, as though caught between the frames of a film. He looked at his hand in mild confusion.
"Tatsumi," Tsuzuki said again.
"Ah, no. Too late for that. Too late for him, little black sheep." Something dark like poisoned honey moved under the surface of Tatsumi's voice, glinted behind the pupils of his eyes. "He gave me his will. He can't take it back again. Time to . . ."
no
"Don't be stupid," Tatsumi said to the air, tone avuncular and chiding.
no
"You've already lost."
no
"Stupid fool of a shinigami . . ." The shadows began to mass around Tatsumi again, and his eyes focused on Tsuzuki. "It seems I need to finish this once and for all."
"Tatsumi!" Tsuzuki called desperately. "We know what happened! It wasn't your fault!"
---
Sometimes illumination comes upon one gently, rising like the dawning sun, bringing understanding and brightening the dark corners of the mind. Ah, one says. Of course. And then the slow smile of comprehension, and the pattern of facts unfolding like a labelled diagram.
Sometimes it hits like a freight train.
It's not a permanent restructuring of my body, Watari realised, as she pulled herself together. It's temporary and my body's having to constantly maintain the desired configuration as per my mind's subconscious desires. That's why I'm so tired and I'm finding it so draining to use any powers. If I consciously let it lapse, I should be able to draw as usual . . .
. . . and, her logic relentlessly pointed out, she'd snap back to being male. And goodbye to any hopes of analysing her current condition, or finding out what chemicals got spilled on her -- as if the demon would answer that in any case -- or anything except going back to the long slog of patient experimenting and living in hope.
As if any of that weighed more than a second's worth against the lives of his friends.
Muraki's paper pad and pen lay on the floor several meters to her right, where they'd been thrown during the disruption of Tatsumi's arrival. She crawled towards them, but even as she did so, she could feel her body begin to return to a more familiar pattern, as though the mere conscious recognition of the situation had been enough to trigger the change back.
Watari took the pen in his hand, and began to draw.
---
Hisoka staggered to his feet. It hadn't worked before, and he couldn't be sure that it would work now, and he was shivering in the overly large yukata, and he was cold, but his mouth still worked, and his hands were still able to move. He focused on Tatsumi. "Hei. Sha. Kai. Jin. Retsu. Zai. Sen. ReiBaku!"
The shield shimmered in the air for a moment -- and then Tatsumi ripped through it as though it was tissue paper.
Hisoka staggered back, hands going to his head in pain.
"Don't think I've forgotten about you." More of the demon's tone seemed to bleed into Tatsumi's voice with every passing moment. "You get in my way far too often. Annoying brat." He raised his hand, and shadow shuriken spun through the air towards Hisoka.
Hisoka watched them coming with a strange calm, the instant before impact seeming to stretch into an eternity. They looked sharp enough to slice the air and make it bleed. He probably wouldn't even have time to truly understand the pain before they cut him to pieces.
The pain took him by surprise. It ripped agonisingly through his body, bringing him to his knees with a scream, as his curse marks flared into undiluted agony. Above his head and around his clenched body, the shuriken cut through the walls, leaving jagged gashes behind them.
"The stupid boy doesn't have enough sense to dodge." Muraki's voice, Hisoka knew it in his bones, even through the ripping pain that etched itself along his nerves and through his skin. "But he's my property, and I don't want him damaged."
The demon's laughter rang through the house. "Do you honestly think you can stop me? The little black lamb there won't risk harming me. The boy doesn't have the strength for it. You're damned already."
Muraki smiled, and a strange light glinted in his eyes. "Ah, but I went knowingly, not like the poor fool you're possessing."
"And don't forget me," said Watari.
All heads turned. Watari -- male again, hair blowing in masses of gold around his face -- was holding something which looked like a raygun from a bad thirties serial sketched by a three-year-old, with abnormally intricate circuitry traced down the sides and around the barrel in sigils and pentagrams.
"What's that?" asked Tsuzuki blankly.
"Anti-demon blaster." He pointed the raygun at Tatsumi. "Let's test it."
The blast threw Tatsumi several feet back in a spray of blue sparks, and knocked him to the ground. He lay there for a moment, smelling faintly of charcoal, before beginning to rise to his feet again. Watari blasted him again and again, but the ray was perceptibly paling and weakening. "Do something!" the scientist called over his shoulder. "This won't work for long!"
Muraki seemed to be holding himself upright by pure force of will. Threads of blood marked a scarlet pattern across the pale rags of his yukata. "You. Boy." He pointed a finger at Hisoka. "Reibaku. Now. While I summon the creature."
---
It went against everything that Hisoka knew to trust Muraki, let alone obey him. But he did it anyhow, and the power flowed through him like light, because this time it was working, this time they might actually have a chance, and he was not going to let Tsuzuki die, Tatsumi die, anyone else die if it could be stopped. Not this time.
He wasn't going to be Muraki.
"Hei. Sha. Kai," he began.
---
Tsuzuki pulled half a dozen ofuda from his pocket, and flung them around the edges of the Reibaku which Hisoka was erecting.
Then he folded his hands and concentrated. His eyes focused on the living air which moved through the house and whispered in growing fury. "Bowing before you I present my wish, the twelve gods who protect me! Blade of air, steel of vacuum, bearing fang of silvery-white! Appear before me! Byakko!"
---
Muraki had traced a circular pattern around the pulsing globe of light which held the recovering Tatsumi. He'd marked names in strange dialects at the corners of the interior pentagram, and with a speed that spoke -- to Hisoka's mind -- of far too much practice, had murmured quick invocations.
However, holding the ReiBaku was requiring all Hisoka's concentration. Tatsumi was starting to pound against it from the inside. He had the vague feeling that he was beginning to bleed at the ears. Tatsumi's hands seemed to be ripping through his flesh and into his brain.
Muraki gestured sharply with one bloodstained hand. For a moment Hisoka couldn't think what he meant, and then a connection stitched itself into his thoughts. Oh. He wants me to drop it.
And he did.
---
Tsuzuki was aware, in the half-time of sorcery and power, that Muraki was creating some sort of rapid magical construct, a form of binding, something tainted with demons and darkness, but it was so different from the tie which he had to his shikigami that he couldn't even perceive it properly. The air rustled and sang to him of steel edges and vital speed, of brightness and deliverance.
The Reibaku vanished, leaving Tatsumi standing at the centre of Muraki's hastily-drawn diagram.
Muraki's voice was ragged but strong, backed with the power of a twisted and shadowed but uncompromising will. He was speaking in Latin -- Tsuzuki could recognise that much, even if he didn't know the language at all -- and the word Saagatanasu rolled through the room. Once. Twice. A third time.
Tatsumi fell to the ground, clutching at his chest, and his muffled cry was stifled at birth as the shadows ebbed and flowed around him, trickling from his mouth and eyes like obscene tears.
And it's so hard to let go. Tsuzuki remembered his own possession; the chains of guilt, the certainty that he deserved to be punished, the surety of despair, and in a way, the comfort of knowing that you were damned and it was all settled and that there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Giving over your soul and letting everything be, because it was no longer your responsibility. Even the pain and despair were sweet, for now you could do nothing else wrong, now you would be punished as you had always known you should be punished, for ever and ever and ever.
Muraki called out the demon's name again, then coughed blood, turning to one side to spit it to the floor.
Tatsumi writhed and choked again, hands scrabbling at his chest. It wasn't clear whether he wanted to tear something out or to keep it inside him.
"Tatsumi." Tsuzuki pitched his voice to carry past the wind. "Listen to me. Listen . . ."
---
Tatsumi curled into the darkness and would not open his eyes. He knew what had been done with his body. With his hands. And finally, with his cooperation. He'd wanted to kill. The fact that he hadn't managed to do so was no saving grace, no forgiveness, no pardon.
He had no right to even try to cast the demon out; it knew the secret parts of his mind, the private shames, the intimate little twists of hatred and lust and pettiness.
It was no more vile than he was.
He had no right to hope for salvation, no reason to ask for mercy.
And yet, in the shadows of his mind, there was a voice that would not let him despair.
Tsuzuki's voice. "Tatsumi. Listen. We need you . . ."
The voice shook with emotion. It was streaked with tears, beginning to fade.
A thought came with it.
If I let myself die, Tsuzuki will weep, and I do not want anyone else to weep over me.
I do not want him to weep over me.
Tatsumi opened his eyes.
---
Hisoka knelt, too tired to stand, and watched the dark feathered hound come exploding out of Tatsumi's body. It raged against the walls of the pentagram, its blows and fangs sliding on the empty air as though it struck solid crystal each time it tried to break its way through. Muraki's voice punctuated its movements in a low dull chant, rising in harsh intervals and unnatural patterns.
He could feel the curse marks glowing faintly, but this was an old pain now, one which he could ignore. Dimly he was conscious that Muraki might be using them to draw strength from him, enough to keep himself standing, but he didn't care any more. As long as this was over. As long as it all stopped. Until they were out of this private hell.
He watched Byakko dive over the boundaries of the pentagram as though they didn't exist -- and presumably they didn't to a shikigami, as they hadn't been raised against such a creature.
He watched the great white tiger tearing the demon to pieces.
This time there was blood. But the wind was fresh, blowing from another world, and it carried a scent of wind, and steel, and stars.
When Byakko was done, the shadows in the room were clean again.
---
Shadows peeled open Muraki's pentagram like knives twitching back the skins of an onion. The layers of amethyst light folded back with a sound that shivered glass, and then Muraki and Tatsumi were both lost in the storm of darkness.
Watari raised her head from behind the sofa, then ducked as a loose tendril of shadow nearly trimmed her hair. "Tsuzuki!" she screamed. "Call Suzaku! Or Byakko! Or something!"
Tsuzuki was paralysed with if/then and if/if not and but-what-if-I contradictions. He didn't actually want Muraki torn to bits. He couldn't risk Tatsumi being hurt. The darkness seemed to avoid him, leaving him in a bubble of comparative light, as though a single sunbeam was striking down on him.
Hisoka had dived for cover with the fall of the hydra creature. He didn't need any sort of empathy or psychometry to tell him that things were going badly wrong. "Tsuzuki!" he called towards the hesitating shinigami. "Take cover, idiot!" The demon's malice was like a second wind in the air beside the purely physical; it rasped over his skin in a thousand tiny poisonous grains of frost, as far beyond human as it was beyond compassion.
---
Time stretched out around Tsuzuki in a long moment, and all he could think was, no.
He would not tolerate this.
No, because Tatsumi had always cared for him and tried to help, and even the times that he had drawn back because he couldn't carry Tsuzuki's sorrows for him and couldn't stop his tears were, in the end, because he'd cared, for otherwise they would never have touched him.
No, because the creature had intended Hisoka's death or worse, had tried to kill Watari, had done everything he could to hurt and harm and destroy.
No, because even Muraki, and whatever mixture of fear and desire and loathing and need he felt for the man didn't matter now, even Muraki had tried to protect him, and had tried to spare Tatsumi's life rather than killing him on sight, and even if the psychopathic doctor deserved death for some of the things he had done -- even then -- he didn't deserve the creature's malice and pain. Nobody did. Death should be enough to settle all accounts.
(And that might have meant something to him, if he had bothered to think about it any further, and considered the fundamental difference between two descendants of darkness, but time was running out, and the thought slipped from his mind like quicksilver and was gone.)
No. No more. Not even if this body died for it.
"Tatsumi!" he called, and walked into the darkness.
It parted in front of him like the bow crest of a wave, washing back to show Tatsumi standing over the body of Muraki. The doctor lay in a crumpled heap on the ground, his yukata in rags, red lines traced across his body with inhuman precision. Tatsumi held Muraki's glasses in his right hand. As he turned to face Tsuzuki, he twisted the wire frames between his fingers and smiled as the glass of the lenses shattered into sparkling black-threaded dust.
"Tsuzuki." The deep voice was as familiar as it had always been. "You shouldn't have run away like that. I'm very annoyed with you."
"I wouldn't run away from Tatsumi," Tsuzuki replied. His words were flat, angry, paid out like a miser's coinage. "Get out of him. Now. I will not tolerate this."
Tatsumi laughed. He reached out with his free hand towards Tsuzuki's cheek -- and then the gesture stopped halfway, as though caught between the frames of a film. He looked at his hand in mild confusion.
"Tatsumi," Tsuzuki said again.
"Ah, no. Too late for that. Too late for him, little black sheep." Something dark like poisoned honey moved under the surface of Tatsumi's voice, glinted behind the pupils of his eyes. "He gave me his will. He can't take it back again. Time to . . ."
no
"Don't be stupid," Tatsumi said to the air, tone avuncular and chiding.
no
"You've already lost."
no
"Stupid fool of a shinigami . . ." The shadows began to mass around Tatsumi again, and his eyes focused on Tsuzuki. "It seems I need to finish this once and for all."
"Tatsumi!" Tsuzuki called desperately. "We know what happened! It wasn't your fault!"
---
Sometimes illumination comes upon one gently, rising like the dawning sun, bringing understanding and brightening the dark corners of the mind. Ah, one says. Of course. And then the slow smile of comprehension, and the pattern of facts unfolding like a labelled diagram.
Sometimes it hits like a freight train.
It's not a permanent restructuring of my body, Watari realised, as she pulled herself together. It's temporary and my body's having to constantly maintain the desired configuration as per my mind's subconscious desires. That's why I'm so tired and I'm finding it so draining to use any powers. If I consciously let it lapse, I should be able to draw as usual . . .
. . . and, her logic relentlessly pointed out, she'd snap back to being male. And goodbye to any hopes of analysing her current condition, or finding out what chemicals got spilled on her -- as if the demon would answer that in any case -- or anything except going back to the long slog of patient experimenting and living in hope.
As if any of that weighed more than a second's worth against the lives of his friends.
Muraki's paper pad and pen lay on the floor several meters to her right, where they'd been thrown during the disruption of Tatsumi's arrival. She crawled towards them, but even as she did so, she could feel her body begin to return to a more familiar pattern, as though the mere conscious recognition of the situation had been enough to trigger the change back.
Watari took the pen in his hand, and began to draw.
---
Hisoka staggered to his feet. It hadn't worked before, and he couldn't be sure that it would work now, and he was shivering in the overly large yukata, and he was cold, but his mouth still worked, and his hands were still able to move. He focused on Tatsumi. "Hei. Sha. Kai. Jin. Retsu. Zai. Sen. ReiBaku!"
The shield shimmered in the air for a moment -- and then Tatsumi ripped through it as though it was tissue paper.
Hisoka staggered back, hands going to his head in pain.
"Don't think I've forgotten about you." More of the demon's tone seemed to bleed into Tatsumi's voice with every passing moment. "You get in my way far too often. Annoying brat." He raised his hand, and shadow shuriken spun through the air towards Hisoka.
Hisoka watched them coming with a strange calm, the instant before impact seeming to stretch into an eternity. They looked sharp enough to slice the air and make it bleed. He probably wouldn't even have time to truly understand the pain before they cut him to pieces.
The pain took him by surprise. It ripped agonisingly through his body, bringing him to his knees with a scream, as his curse marks flared into undiluted agony. Above his head and around his clenched body, the shuriken cut through the walls, leaving jagged gashes behind them.
"The stupid boy doesn't have enough sense to dodge." Muraki's voice, Hisoka knew it in his bones, even through the ripping pain that etched itself along his nerves and through his skin. "But he's my property, and I don't want him damaged."
The demon's laughter rang through the house. "Do you honestly think you can stop me? The little black lamb there won't risk harming me. The boy doesn't have the strength for it. You're damned already."
Muraki smiled, and a strange light glinted in his eyes. "Ah, but I went knowingly, not like the poor fool you're possessing."
"And don't forget me," said Watari.
All heads turned. Watari -- male again, hair blowing in masses of gold around his face -- was holding something which looked like a raygun from a bad thirties serial sketched by a three-year-old, with abnormally intricate circuitry traced down the sides and around the barrel in sigils and pentagrams.
"What's that?" asked Tsuzuki blankly.
"Anti-demon blaster." He pointed the raygun at Tatsumi. "Let's test it."
The blast threw Tatsumi several feet back in a spray of blue sparks, and knocked him to the ground. He lay there for a moment, smelling faintly of charcoal, before beginning to rise to his feet again. Watari blasted him again and again, but the ray was perceptibly paling and weakening. "Do something!" the scientist called over his shoulder. "This won't work for long!"
Muraki seemed to be holding himself upright by pure force of will. Threads of blood marked a scarlet pattern across the pale rags of his yukata. "You. Boy." He pointed a finger at Hisoka. "Reibaku. Now. While I summon the creature."
---
It went against everything that Hisoka knew to trust Muraki, let alone obey him. But he did it anyhow, and the power flowed through him like light, because this time it was working, this time they might actually have a chance, and he was not going to let Tsuzuki die, Tatsumi die, anyone else die if it could be stopped. Not this time.
He wasn't going to be Muraki.
"Hei. Sha. Kai," he began.
---
Tsuzuki pulled half a dozen ofuda from his pocket, and flung them around the edges of the Reibaku which Hisoka was erecting.
Then he folded his hands and concentrated. His eyes focused on the living air which moved through the house and whispered in growing fury. "Bowing before you I present my wish, the twelve gods who protect me! Blade of air, steel of vacuum, bearing fang of silvery-white! Appear before me! Byakko!"
---
Muraki had traced a circular pattern around the pulsing globe of light which held the recovering Tatsumi. He'd marked names in strange dialects at the corners of the interior pentagram, and with a speed that spoke -- to Hisoka's mind -- of far too much practice, had murmured quick invocations.
However, holding the ReiBaku was requiring all Hisoka's concentration. Tatsumi was starting to pound against it from the inside. He had the vague feeling that he was beginning to bleed at the ears. Tatsumi's hands seemed to be ripping through his flesh and into his brain.
Muraki gestured sharply with one bloodstained hand. For a moment Hisoka couldn't think what he meant, and then a connection stitched itself into his thoughts. Oh. He wants me to drop it.
And he did.
---
Tsuzuki was aware, in the half-time of sorcery and power, that Muraki was creating some sort of rapid magical construct, a form of binding, something tainted with demons and darkness, but it was so different from the tie which he had to his shikigami that he couldn't even perceive it properly. The air rustled and sang to him of steel edges and vital speed, of brightness and deliverance.
The Reibaku vanished, leaving Tatsumi standing at the centre of Muraki's hastily-drawn diagram.
Muraki's voice was ragged but strong, backed with the power of a twisted and shadowed but uncompromising will. He was speaking in Latin -- Tsuzuki could recognise that much, even if he didn't know the language at all -- and the word Saagatanasu rolled through the room. Once. Twice. A third time.
Tatsumi fell to the ground, clutching at his chest, and his muffled cry was stifled at birth as the shadows ebbed and flowed around him, trickling from his mouth and eyes like obscene tears.
And it's so hard to let go. Tsuzuki remembered his own possession; the chains of guilt, the certainty that he deserved to be punished, the surety of despair, and in a way, the comfort of knowing that you were damned and it was all settled and that there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Giving over your soul and letting everything be, because it was no longer your responsibility. Even the pain and despair were sweet, for now you could do nothing else wrong, now you would be punished as you had always known you should be punished, for ever and ever and ever.
Muraki called out the demon's name again, then coughed blood, turning to one side to spit it to the floor.
Tatsumi writhed and choked again, hands scrabbling at his chest. It wasn't clear whether he wanted to tear something out or to keep it inside him.
"Tatsumi." Tsuzuki pitched his voice to carry past the wind. "Listen to me. Listen . . ."
---
Tatsumi curled into the darkness and would not open his eyes. He knew what had been done with his body. With his hands. And finally, with his cooperation. He'd wanted to kill. The fact that he hadn't managed to do so was no saving grace, no forgiveness, no pardon.
He had no right to even try to cast the demon out; it knew the secret parts of his mind, the private shames, the intimate little twists of hatred and lust and pettiness.
It was no more vile than he was.
He had no right to hope for salvation, no reason to ask for mercy.
And yet, in the shadows of his mind, there was a voice that would not let him despair.
Tsuzuki's voice. "Tatsumi. Listen. We need you . . ."
The voice shook with emotion. It was streaked with tears, beginning to fade.
A thought came with it.
If I let myself die, Tsuzuki will weep, and I do not want anyone else to weep over me.
I do not want him to weep over me.
Tatsumi opened his eyes.
---
Hisoka knelt, too tired to stand, and watched the dark feathered hound come exploding out of Tatsumi's body. It raged against the walls of the pentagram, its blows and fangs sliding on the empty air as though it struck solid crystal each time it tried to break its way through. Muraki's voice punctuated its movements in a low dull chant, rising in harsh intervals and unnatural patterns.
He could feel the curse marks glowing faintly, but this was an old pain now, one which he could ignore. Dimly he was conscious that Muraki might be using them to draw strength from him, enough to keep himself standing, but he didn't care any more. As long as this was over. As long as it all stopped. Until they were out of this private hell.
He watched Byakko dive over the boundaries of the pentagram as though they didn't exist -- and presumably they didn't to a shikigami, as they hadn't been raised against such a creature.
He watched the great white tiger tearing the demon to pieces.
This time there was blood. But the wind was fresh, blowing from another world, and it carried a scent of wind, and steel, and stars.
When Byakko was done, the shadows in the room were clean again.
---
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