Spiral of Life

A Yami no Matsuei fanfic


When he awoke, he was surrounded by white.

This was nothing new; he always woke up to white. He turned his head to one side, trying to dislodge the catheters from his nose--he had done this ever since his parents had put him in hospital. But there was nothing in his nose. And once he noticed that, he began noticing other things--that this particular shade of white was a new kind of white, brighter than the hospital's white, and that the sharp tang of medicine and sickness was gone. Hisoka held himself very still, kept his breathing low and even, and wondered where in the hell he was.

After a long time of endless monotony (he'd had no visitors in the hospital), the hours had begun blurring into one long, endless day, and he could no longer keep the days or even the months straight--at one point, he had even been confused as to which year it was. But yesterday had been different. Yesterday--something had happened. He was sure of it. Something related to why the white was different. To why he was no longer in the hospital.

"He's awake." He didn't recognize the voice, and he knew the voices of all of his doctors and nurses by heart. "It's all right now, bon. You're in a good place. Can you open your eyes for me?"

For a few brief seconds, he was tempted to keep them closed, out of pure spite. He'd never been what you would call a model child. But curiosity, in the end, won out, as it does for most teenagers, and he opened his eyes. He had to squint against the bright light, but his eyes adjusted quickly, and he made out two men and a small room with a window in it--that was where the light was coming from. Hisoka reached up and rubbed his eyes. "Who...." That had come out as just a dry rasp. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Who are you? Where am I?"

The man on his right smiled and nodded his head. He was slender, with bright blond hair--of a more orangeish tint than Hisoka's--and a pair of glasses perched haphazardly on his nose. He had a stethoscope around his neck, which Hisoka eyed suspiciously. A doctor, maybe, but his aura, warm and peach-colored, with a few splashes of orange-red, made Hisoka relax in spite of himself. "My name is Watari Yutaka," he said. "I'm a doctor who works for the JuOhCho. This is Kachou--Kanoe, my boss. It's nice to meet you... Kurosaki Hisoka, right?"

Hisoka narrowed his eyes, shifting them to the left. Kanoe was a forbidding looking man, kind of like Hisoka's father, and he couldn't get much of a reading on him. His face, for what it was worth, looked grumpy. "... The JuOhCho?" he asked.

Watari smiled again. "Basically, you're in the Meifu, bon," he said. Hisoka stared at him. "Well, sort of. At any rate, you're dead."

... Dead? How is that possible? Just yesterday, he had been... ah, but then... Hisoka closed his eyes, struggling to make his atrophied brain work properly again. What had happened?

"Doctor, he's gone into cardiac distress!"

"Hold him down, hold him down, he's gone into seizures--how is that possible, this has never happened before!"

"Blood pressure is dropping rapidly. We're losing him."

"Clear!"

"No effect. Blood pressure is still dropping. Doctor, he's been in arrest for three and a half minutes now."

Hisoka closed his eyes and leaned his head against the pillow. Ah. Cardiac arrest. And they had gotten there too late to help him. He was probably in a body bag by now. He opened one eye, looking hazily at the doctor fellow. "What is JuOhCho?" he asked again.

"JuOhCho is where we help process the souls of the dead," said Kanoe.

Hisoka raised his eyebrows. "So, what... am I going to be judged or whatever?"

"Not exactly," said Watari, raking the hair back from his eyes. "Because of the manner of your death, you are qualified to become a Shinigami."

Hisoka stared blindly at a spot on the sidewalk, one finger unconsciously playing with his bottom lip. He felt acutely uncomfortable in this Meifu, where everything was a study in paradox--people who were rightly dead walking around as if they were alive, and trees and landscapes that shouldn't even exist standing around for the admiration of dead people. And everyone looking so young but feeling so old and... sad, so many of them. It was a muted sort of sadness, a resigned sadness, but, as Watari had explained, all of them had died unsatisfying deaths, and couldn't even bear to let themselves go.

Could he be one of them? Impossible. His life had sucked. Why should he want to drag it on any longer?

"This is a big decision, bon," said Watari softly. He was sitting beside Hisoka on the bench, his little owl perched on his shoulder and hooting solemnly at Hisoka. "You should think about it seriously. You're only sixteen."

"Is the person who killed me in my file?" Hisoka asked, glancing at him.

Watari shook his head.

Hisoka looked back down at the ground. "I could... find him, if I became a shinigami?"

"It's possible," Watari admitted. "It's not guaranteed."

"But there's a chance...." Hisoka fell quiet. Then he said, firmly, "I want to kill them. I want to... hurt them for what they did to me...."

Watari's hand fell on his shoulder. Hisoka flinched, and the doctor withdrew quickly and discreetly. "But that is the problem with us, the Shinigami," he said. "Revenge. Is that all you want to live for, bon?"

No. But what else had he ever been able to live for? Revenge on his parents, revenge on the people who made the world so bad... what else was there for someone like him, who could feel everyone's pain and suffering? He didn't want it. He hadn't asked for it. But he had it. And he hadn't asked for his parents to hate him for it, and he hadn't asked to die the way he had. It was unfair. He wanted revenge. On both of them.

"I understand, bon," said Watari gently.

Hisoka cocked the gun, marveling at how real it felt in his hands. Kanoe had given it to him, but it felt as real as any other weapon he had used--staff, bokken or sword. It felt strange, holding it. It didn't seem quite right. What the hell would he ever use a gun for? He was Shinigami, after all.

Discomfited, he slid the gun into his coat and stepped out onto the streets. That was even stranger. A few people smiled at him apologetically as they bumped into him. They had no idea. No idea. He had to stop for a few moments and just look around. He breathed in the smells, walked a few steps, bent down and touched the ground with solid fingers. For all intents and purposes, he was alive. Not just alive; he was practically immortal. Death had trapped him into a spiral of life.

Hisoka took a deep breath and stood. Not the time to fall apart, Hisoka. Scanning the crowd, he gingerly extended his empathic sense, hoping that somehow a vampire's signature would be different from a human's. (Is my signature different from a human's?) He couldn't feel anything significant, just normal human emotions; worry, self-consciousness, happiness, anger, resignation. That man had just been fired. The woman walking past him had just acquired her liberal arts degree. And the woman beside her... her son had just died from cancer.

Hisoka stood still and gazed at her. She was standing still in the crowd, her eyes fixed somewhere on the street. She was middle-aged, and pretty; her son couldn't have been that old. She wore a Chinese dress, her hands plucking constantly at its embroidery. On the surface, she looked perfectly ordinary; to Hisoka, she looked so overwhelmingly tired, so distraught. She felt she could never recover. How does one recover from caring for such a sick son, from long nights of holding his hand and cleaning up his vomit, from days of listening to doctors, hoping that the chemo and the radiation will make him better. How does a person recover from watching their child lie suffering in a hospital bed, each day seeing him thinner and thinner, in more and more pain. For a few days near the end, she had stopped going at all, her own pain had been so great at seeing him dying. But on the day of his death, she had gone to see him, and as he slipped away had held his hand in hers and stroked his hair from his face.

Hisoka turned away from her, something choking in his throat. With a start, he recognized his own emotion. Loneliness.

His mother had never gone to see him. Did she feel this emptiness now? No, of course not; she was glad to be rid of her devil son. In the beginning, she hadn't felt that way about him. Like any other son, he had been loved and cherished, bounced on her knee, suckled on her breast, sung to when he couldn't fall asleep. He didn't quite remember how it had changed. He only remembered that one day, when he had put up his arms to be held, she had turned away from him. And he remembered the first day he had been sick. He had woken up in the morning with a terrible pain all over his body, particularly in his genitals and on his chest and arms. Moving had made him throw up. For days, all he had been able to do was lie still and try to think himself past the pain, before his parents had finally noticed he was sick.

They had had him seen by a doctor perfunctorily, and in secret. His diagnosis was cancer. For an instant, Hisoka had seen something on his mother's face--perhaps some form of shared pain?--and then she had hardened. His parents had the servants take care of him. They themselves never came up to see him. It had been one of the servants, a timid girl Hisoka's age, who had finally told them that he needed to be taken to a hospital. So, on his fifteenth birthday, he was packed into a car and delivered to the nearest hospital. After that, he saw no one from his house, and hadn't till the day he had died.

The woman was still standing there. A true mother. Tentatively, Hisoka reached out towards her, tried to project some of his feelings onto her. You were a good mother, you loved him, and he's all right now. He's all right. As if she had sensed it, she turned around, and fixed her eyes on him. He felt her shock of recognition. He looked just like her son.

Hisoka fled, burdened by the residue of that startlement, and the overwhelming feeling of love that had followed it.

Tsuzuki, Hisoka thought, was something like a mother. Something like that mother, as a matter of fact. He felt everyone's pain so clearly, though he himself was not empathic (ironic, that). And he suffered because of it. He suffered because he felt the pain of people whose souls he had to take, whose lives he had to cut off. Like a mother who can't bear the thought of her child dying before her, was Tsuzuki. Hisoka, who had spent years trying not to feel other people's pain, was awed and ashamed by the depths of Tsuzuki's guilt.

And angered, sometimes. Such pain as Tsuzuki's couldn't be ignored, and Hisoka had had to come out of his shell and try to take a little of that pain away from him. He didn't think it was working. But he tried. And he had never tried before.

He sat down next to Tsuzuki and handed him a little baggie filled with sweets. Tsuzuki smiled at him, gibbered some form of thanks, and set to devouring everything in the bag in short order. Hisoka unwrapped his own small sweet and ate it slowly. The sun was setting and it was getting cold. He wished he'd worn a jacket.

Tsuzuki flung his dress coat over his shoulders, and Hisoka glanced up, surprised. Tsuzuki smiled at him and tousled his hair. "You're so skinny," he teased. "I knew you'd be cold."

Hisoka snorted, and had hard work to control his blush.

There was a long silence. Tsuzuki finished his sweets, crumpled the baggie and stuffed it into his pocket. He leaned against the bench, stretched out his arms. One wrapped firmly around Hisoka's shoulder, filling him with a sense of indolence, happiness, contentment. Underneath that was pain, of course, but muted and subdued for now, like a wild lion whose mate and children had quieted him. Tsuzuki bled, but sometimes Hisoka could staunch it. He wished he could forever.

"Once, I had to take the soul of a boy." Hisoka looked over at him, startled, but Tsuzuki's gaze was fixed on the stars, a melancholy smile on his face. "He'd been sick for a long time, and his name was written in the Kiseki. You know, he was suffering so much. I think he was ready to go--so I was wondering, when I saw him, why he was still hanging on. He knew what I was right off; you know how sometimes really ill people get sort of a sixth sense, or something? I asked him why he was still here. We were in the hospital, and he was lying in bed, looking so thin and sick. It was terrible. He told me that his mother hadn't come by for a week. He was afraid she might have given up on him. He knew he was about to die, but all he wanted was to see his mother one more time.

"I posed as a doctor and told her that he was getting better, so she might want to go in and see how he was doing. Well, she went. You know, Hisoka, I think that's one of the only good things I've done as a Shinigami; I got that poor kid's mother to talk to him one last time before he let himself die. I couldn't imagine it. Hanging on for seven days when all you wanted to do was die, just so you could tell your mother how much you loved her and that you didn't blame her for anything."

He fell silent again. He was silent for so long that Hisoka thought there must be something required of him. He cleared his throat, and said, "Why are you telling me this, Tsuzuki?"

"Because he reminded me so much of you," Tsuzuki said immediately. He turned and looked at Hisoka. Moonlight glimmered on his dark eyelashes. "He looked just like you. Big green eyes, blond hair--a little darker and shorter than yours, though. But what really reminds me of you... he was so strong, you know? He was in so much pain, but he was so strong. I could never be like that. You are."

He caught Hisoka's hands in his larger ones, and Hisoka looked away, flushing hotly. "Idiot," he mumbled.

He felt Tsuzuki's smile. "I know." Tsuzuki reached out and took him in his arms. Like a mother's hug, warm and strong, but uniquely Tsuzuki, smelling of soap and candy. For a few brief moments, Tsuzuki's pain was gone. Hisoka closed his eyes.

Hisoka saw the young mother again a few weeks later. She looked better; she was standing in front of a department store, gazing at the display. He stood still and watched her. She was feeling better, as well; he sensed another presence within her, and wondered if she knew yet. New life was always a good way to heal.

He could remember the feeling that her love had given him, but didn't want to feel it again; he knew that it hadn't been for him. So he turned around and walked back the way he had come, towards Tsuzuki. The older Shinigami smiled at him and put an arm around his shoulder. Warmth, affection, happiness. And pain, yes, but maybe that would change someday. As much a part of Tsuzuki as it was, it would be a long time before he got rid of it. But he would.

This life, this existence as a Shinigami was just a stepping stone. As the old life had been, and however many lives he had had before that. But at least, now, he had someone to climb the steps with him. And maybe, when they had crossed all the roads and finished all the journeys, they could start an entirely new life; one where the past wasn't forgotten, just merely transcended.