A/N: I made certain changes and edits to chapter 50 because I realized it would work better that way. They are substantial enough that you should go back and reread it. I apologize-I don't like to make significant changes after a chapter has been posted, but this time I believe it called for it.
Without a heart, mortal or immortal, Yukie could not become fully human. Without a heart, she could not live in the human world, disguised or not. Her heart was missing because the yuki-onna had ripped it out. Now she meant to return the favor.
Certain stories, the fairy tales which are at the heart of the human psyche, have been told and retold so often that where they came from has been forgotten completely. They change to fit the country or the village where the storyteller lives. People may stumble over the tale of Cinderella in a collection of Asian tales and think , 'Oh, they must have gotten that from some European traveler.', when in fact it is the other way around. Her slippers were not glass, in the old tales; they were fur. It was the French who caused that confusion, when someone mistook 'vair', fur, for 'verre', glass.
Forget about the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy-they were simply the first ones to write the stories down and have them printed. The tales came into being millennia before.
Most tales change the description of the princess to match the local standards of beauty. So in one place, the princess may have golden hair and in another, brown or red. Except for one. In one fairy tale, the princess is always described the same way. Always. That particular story begins:
'Once upon a time, a queen who was with child sat at her window with her sewing in her lap, watching the snowflakes drift down like feathers. While she was watching the snow, she jabbed her finger with the needle, drawing blood. The blood stained the white cloth she was working on, and seeing how beautiful the red looked against the white, and both against the black wood of the window frame, she said, "How I wish that my daughter would have skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony."'
And in that tale, there is always an evil queen who calls for the heart of the young princess. What was forgotten is why.
Her father watched as Raven's news dampened Rose's elation, but his daughter staunchly announced, "We'll be there to help her, though. She won't have to do it alone."
"I guess not-but wait a minute. About this yokai thing-is she not a normal human? And did you know?" Raven asked.
"I knew," Deathstroke replied. "The night we met, Yukie tested as 'Not Nonhuman.' Now we know what that meant; she had no idea at the time." His manner deflected any further attempt to draw him out.
"So anyway, you know something about this Snowy-yuki-onny-elemental business. What exactly are we looking at?" Cyborg asked Rose. "And what's a yokai?"
"I've read three books about yokai," she replied, and her father tuned them out.
He sat there among the children and listened to their chatter without hearing it. Yukie, missing, Yukie lost to him, dead, dying... Part of him did not care at all, and that was the part which usually ruled his actions and decisions.
He'd gotten what he wanted out of the relationship-Rose had agreed to come back and train with him again, even without Yukie, and he in turn had learned how to relate to his daughter better. Insofar as his goal was concerned, he didn't need Yukie anymore. That was the part of him which could calculate the exact angle for a head shot without thinking about it, the part which automatically looked for attackers whenever he entered a room, even in his own house.
Then there was the other part of him, which did feel, and that part of him felt Yukie's absence keenly.
Slade Wilson's answer to dealing with pain, loss and grief was to compartmentalize it. Lock it away. Wall it off, like Montresor did to Fortunato in that Poe story he read in Junior High, The Cask of Amontillado. He knew he was not unique in this; many American men still dealt with their emotions that way, binding them as the Chinese upper classes bound their daughters' feet so they wouldn't grow, but he took it to greater extremes than most.
It began when a five year old Slady sat in the corner of the charity ward where his mother died, a room which stank of urine, cheap disinfectant and some vague steam-table food smell. He rolled a toy car back and forth, winding around the legs of a chair, making a quiet vroom-vroom with his mouth. He hears the grown-ups around him talking, but it washes over him, just sounds.
(Such a shame she must have been a pretty thing and no more than twenty-three-twenty-four so young to pass like that pneumonia wasn't it? Might as well say poverty malnutrition and overwork)
(Lookit that's her lil boy isn't he just adorable with those curls and all he's been so good I don't think he understands yet)
I'm sorry Mr. Wilson but your wife passed away about twenty minutes ago says the doctor.
Shit what the fuck am I supposed to do with the brat now?
Daddy's toe kicks the chair leg and Slady flinches. When Daddy is around, which isn't much, he has to be very very quiet and good. No matter what happens. No matter what he hears.
I can't answer that what I need to know is what do you want done with the remains? Which funeral home? the doctor asks
Funeral home? Do I look like I have that kind of money? Look isn't this a teaching hospital? Don't you buy cadavers for dissection? Daddy replies
You want to sell us your wife's body says the Doctor
I got the kid to feed don't I?
Selling human remains is not legal in this state answers the doctor
Then look let's say I just donate her to you for, like, science I can do that right? Daddy asks
Yes I'll get the paperwork says the doctor, who walks away.
Slady was bored. He looked up at his father. "When's Mommy gonna be better?" he asked, very carefully.
"She's as better as she's ever goin ta be. Look, Mommy's dead, okay? She's, uh, inna better place."
Dead? Dead like Jimmy's puppy down the block, the one that got run over? He remembered when that happened, the way the tire smooshed the little dog's soft body. He remembers the mashed blood and bones, the sharp whine that cut off so suddenly. He remembers the smell, and how Jimmy screamed.
He knew what dead meant.
"Mommy's dead?" He started to cry, and his daddy cuffed him around the ear.
"Look, I don't wanna hear it. Suck it up and shut up. Be a man. Tough it out. Crying is for women and sissy boys. Is that what you are, a sissy boy?" his daddy asked him.
"No," he says, gulping. He had no idea exactly what a sissy boy was, just that it was something bad, so he didn't want to be it. So he stopped crying. He sucked it up. He toughed it out. Except sometimes when he was alone at night while his father was out somewhere, he sobbed into his pillow. He took his grief and his pain and locked it away, walled it up somewhere in the back of his head.
Seven years later, when his father shoved him out of the car and drove away without looking back, he toughed it out again.
And then again in the group home when the matron locked him in a closet for two days straight, for raiding the kitchen after hours.
And when things...happened to him that he would rather be drawn and quartered than admit to anyone, ever, things that left him bleeding from places no one should ever bleed from, sick and horrified...he toughed that out too.
And when his commanding officer ordered them to eliminate an entire village suspected of harboring the Viet Cong. Everyone: women, children, elderly people, infants in their mothers' arms. It was the wrong village, as it turned out. That did not make anyone less dead.
He had volunteered to test the serum which changed him so drastically both physically and mentally. It seemed to change his personality as well, but what Adeline had never understood was that it had only brought out what was there all along, repressed and suppressed until he could act and seem as normal as anyone. All the time she had known him, she had never known him: she had known the normal-seeming All-American guy he pretended to be, making up a new background, lying to her, acting the part.
It didn't mean he didn't love her-if anything, it meant he loved her so much he would do anything to keep her. But after the serum, he couldn't keep up the façade any longer. She stuck it out with him for years all the same, increasingly angry. When she screamed at him, telling him, 'You ruin everything you touch, every relationship. You've destroyed our lives, our sons' lives, our family. You're rotten inside-no better than an animal!'-he never defended himself, because she had every right to. When she shot him, he didn't retaliate. When she divorced him, he didn't contest it or claim any of her fortune. She had good cause. He was toxic-as a husband, as a father, as a friend.
Around him, the conversation was still going on. Rose told the group, "The story is that the first yuki-onna was a spirit that lived on the moon and came down to Earth because it wanted to see what it was like, but it got stuck here. All of the rest are descended from that one, and there must have been a lot of them at one time, because there are stories about them all over Japan, wherever it snows in the winter.
"They can control and create snow and ice, manipulate the weather, transform into an icy gust of wind, shoot ice projectiles, flash-freeze things, they're strong enough to pick up a man bigger than they are over their heads and toss him off a cliff, plus they have some kind of mental powers or can cast illusions to lure people to their deaths in the snow."
"Okay," Cyborg said, sounding dubious, "but why do they lure people to their deaths in the snow?"
"Um, well-the story is that they're like living vampires, only they live off life energy, not blood. Yuki-onna freeze their prey solid and consume their vital essence. It can't be the only way they eat, because there are also accounts of them living among humans for years. Somebody would have noticed that they never ate regular food or that the neighbors were all freezing to death one-by-one," Rose temporized. "Nobody ever noticed they weren't human, not even their husbands or children, except that they didn't age."
"It sounds like you want to have it both ways-that they're dangerous killers and nice people both. Does it really work like that?" Cyborg prodded.
"What about the armed forces?" Rose countered. "Trained soldiers who've seen combat are dangerous killers, and they can still be good people."
He smiled to himself. Thank you, Rose. He hadn't done too badly with her.
His first post-divorce relationship, with Vigilante, an ex-cop turned costumed adventurer named Patricia, had only driven home how toxic he was, and then trying to raise Rose on his own finished him on trying to have a relationship with anyone.
Sometimes he looked at all the people around him in the world, effortlessly having lives, relationships, families, and wondered-why can't I have that? What makes me so different?
Then he would swallow another chunk of rage and sorrow, tough it out, be a man about it. He was no more than a killing machine, and he might as well accept that. Accept it? Take pride in it. Be the most efficient, effective killing machine on the planet, and never mind the hollow hunger for companionship. For love.
Then one night, he entered a Jian Wu competition and wound up meeting Yukie. Somehow it worked. It helped that she had a serene, imperturbable temperament, a lively sense of humor, and, as it turned out, believed that being a professional mercenary and assassin was a reasonable and intelligent career choice.
So he, Slade Wilson was in a relationship, a good relationship, a stable relationship and how the hell did that happen? He hadn't bothered to lie to her or pretend to be anything he wasn't, and she didn't judge him or come into it with a script she expected him to follow without even giving him a copy. Perhaps that was it. Or maybe it was simply love.
He loved Yukie, and he needed her. With Yukie in his life, he felt like a human being. He felt normal. If it turned out that she had to freeze people from time to time and consume their 'vital essence', then he'd just have to find somebody who richly deserved it. She was his heart.
Nora commented, "I'm still...getting used to things like this. Here Yukie is becoming this Snow Elemental Yuki-onna thing and the world's not ending. You're worried for her, of course, but you're also really excited about the powers she's getting."
"Well, it is really cool," Rose said. "I mean, she had to live with getting overheated and not being able to compete professionally at Jian Wu because of it, so it's great that she won't have to be sidelined anymore."
"Oh, I saw the video of that!" Nora exclaimed. "It was-amazing. Inspiring. I'm working out a pas de deux based on it. I might not be able to dance professionally anymore, but I can still do choreography for others. But if Yukie hasn't been competing at Jian Wu, how did she do so well that night? I know she only won on a technicality."
"She practiced on her own," Rose said. "Lately she's been sparring with Dad. Heh, we went to visit her old dojo and her sensei chewed her out for not keeping up to his standards. Then she beat his best current student and he chewed her out for still not being the best in the world, let alone the best of all time. But the way he looked, he was pretty pleased with her anyway."
"I can't set us down any closer to the source of the GPS signal than this," Victor Fries announced, landing the aircraft. "We'll have to go on foot from here. The only difficulty will be the lack of a hand-held tracker."
"That's not a problem," Cyborg tapped his head. "Got one built in. S'why they call me 'Cyborg'."
"Very well, then. You shall lead the way."
The youth did, taking them on a trek around and through the snow chasms, until they reached an outcropping of rock where Yukie's crimson jacket lay on top of the snow, neatly folded. An arctic fox sat near it, its white fur almost as white as the snow on which it sat, watching the group approach with great interest.
Rose went over to the garment, and checked its pockets. "Here's her phone. It still has some charge-."
"Rose, get back," her father warned, unholstering his handgun.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because a fox out here in the wilds that has no fear of humans isn't normal. It's probably rabid. Sick, anyway-." Slade took careful aim.
"Wait, Dad! Look at its tails!" Rose exclaimed, pointing at the beast. "It's not just a fox, it's a kitsune. Another yokai!"
It had swung its back end around, and now proudly fanned out no less than five long, handsome tails for them to see, looking back at them with an expectant expression.
"Huh," Deathstroke grunted. "Are you another one of these yokai? Prove it. Do something a normal fox couldn't do."
It yapped, then changed color, from white to russet, the rusty hue suffusing it like a spill mopped up with a paper towel.
"Okay, you have me convinced," he said, returning his weapon to its holster. "So what are you doing here?"
It yapped again, then dashed a few paces and stopped to look back at them. Seeing that they weren't moving, it ran back, then dashed away again in the same direction. Finally it rolled its eyes and nodded in the direction it had run toward.
"You have got to be kidding me," Slade said. "Is Lassie trying to tell us Timmy fell down the old well?" he asked sarcastically.
"Hah!" Victor Fries laughed briefly, "I'm not sure a Japanese fox, however supernatural, would get the reference. Besides, this is a male fox. Its intentions, however, are clear. It does want us to follow it. This reminds me of certain books I read back when I was a boy-talking, or at least, intelligent animals, magic, and quests." He sounded rather wistful, and his wife drew near to give him a quick hug.
"Let's see where he leads us," she said, and the group did so, following the kitsune wherever he might lead them, Rose with Yukie's jacket over her arm.
A/N: I have been dropping Snow White references here and there for ages. I can hardly list how many. The first time Yukie appears, it's with an apple green scarf around her neck. Nora even thinks, 'Snow White, only Asian,' when they meet. Yukie's favorite perfume has green apple as its dominant note (it's Lush Cosmetics' 'So White', BTW, I didn't put that in because it seemed too obvious.) In this scene, there's Slade as the Prince, Rose as his attendant, and seven others. Not dwarves, I admit, but some of them are kids and smallish. Plus there are lots of other clues. Now I can cop to it. I assure you that Yukie will be more proactive in her own rescue than simply lying around in a glass coffin!
However, there will be NO singing with happy little bluebirds or adorable woodland creatures. Not even if the songs are 'Do You Want To Build a Snowman?' and 'Let It Go.'
