Ch.3: Though the Dream Has Ended
For a moment, I just leaned on the door and let the terrible truth of what I'd just done wash over me. But in an instant that was also swept away and I laughed in relief. He was gone, that intruder in my territory - that sensitive human territory that I'd just learned to use in the last seventeen years - and the youko inside of me fiercely hoped that he would never return. Though I could never do to him what I'd done to so many past lovers in bed (which was kill them), the youko inside of me could certifiably do it during the daytime. But even as I laughed, I backed from the door in the most cautious manner possible, not allowing myself to touch the wood any more than I had to. Already my thoughts were thinking more friendly thoughts towards entering and exiting through the window instead of the door. Weakness, that was what it was - by now, there was more than just a wooden door between the two of us, there were probably three kilometers as well - but that door represented everything that I had done to PUSH HIM OUT OF MY LIFE.
The human side of me shuddered and bent in self-pity, but the youko side of me was angrier than ever, at myself and at Hiei. How could a petty, low-life fire demon stroll into my heart like that? And more than ever, the youko was screaming at the human side of me, the one that somehow had become all the more influential in all matters of daily life in the past few years. That side of me was purely human; it was still growing like any human teenager would, with new ideas developing in that head and growing maturity all the time. The youko side did not share its experience with life with the human because still the human couldn't see how people could be cruel, unkind, could like causing themselves and other pain because in some morbid way it was beautiful, or that killing was always justifiable, from all points of view. Now, at the ultimate betrayal, the only thing it ever did was weep.
And Kurama, my not-youko-not-human-but-some-odd-fusion, wasn't willing to go either way. The best course of action, all three parts of my mind agreed, was to just resort to isolationism for a little while, and then make sure I never saw Hiei ever again. It wouldn't be all that hard, I supposed; I could politely decline any mission given by Koenma to the Urameshi Team that included Hiei (after all, there were several solo or duo missions given before) or request another partner, and I only had to keep Hiei away from my human counterpart, whose feelings for the fire demon would certainly grate against the youko's usual course of action. I only had to wait seventy or eighty years for that human aspect to die, of course, and then I would be able to return to Makai as Youko Kurama, in heart and mind.
Not that I relished the coming. I, as Kurama and as Youko Kurama, was afraid that returning to Makai would erase all traces that I had been among humanity, in so-described 'primitive' Ningenkai to all those demons in Makai, for an entire eighty or so years. This was an experience I didn't want to forget - surely, the dormant feelings of 'sympathy', 'forgiveness', and 'love' had been lost to me before and that was not the best thing I'd like to remember as the Youko, but the entire ride as a human being had been somehow a refreshing change. Perhaps it had been because I never had to run in this world - I never had to hide anymore with Koenma's protection over me (somewhat). At this thought, my youko side denied all charges - I mean, when did you ever see a demon who was bored of killing? - but somehow I had become weary of Makai along the way. Or, perhaps it was the emotions that I had felt as a human. I couldn't be sure.
Which brought us back to Hiei. The youko side slammed down the ultimatum: damn, he couldn't even say the "L" word, so he didn't mean anything. And slowly, the human side of me began to see what the youko was getting at. Only me, that not-youko-not-human Kurama, remained undecided.
I was a fusion of both worlds, for better or for worse. I had the sentimentality of a human but the cunning mind of a youko, and so it was hard to ride the ultimate path without appeasing my human side's want to never kill anyone. Of course, the youko had a stronger influence over the middle Kurama, but human emotional influence was there as well. I walked a very thin path in never wanting to hurt anyone but wanting to punish those who needed to be punished. Innocents could never be hurt or even witness my destructive power. And yet that inner sense of pride that the youko had, that damnably big ego, determined more of my actions than my human counterpart did.
[If you could only see
Like you did before]
But how in the world could I throw away something that I had wholeheartedly poured out my soul to do? To have finally arrested the courage, to have hardened my mind to the ultimate disappointment that might have cracked my human mind from the pain of rejection - I had survive all of that to find that Hiei did, indeed, care for me. That had been the peak of the human inside of me, all of those feelings had overtaken the youko's impulse to take and then run. The question lay rather in what Hiei was afraid of me doing - certainly I had suppressed the youko inside of me for so long in his presence, was he afraid of it rising up? But the youko had agreed with this truthful, close friendship like Hiei and I shared, as sentimental and human as it was (the youko usually disagreed with anything that involved being human); it had offered a new outlet for emotion that even youko's had to feel after a century or two.
My mind was shut, the thoughts milling like ants, spreading in every direction like running water. And suddenly I knew there must be something big that I must have missed along the way.
It was never like Hiei to leave me hanging like this. It was a clue, I knew this because Hiei, as blunt as he usually was, could be sneaky when he wanted to be. What did I have to see, though, that had diminished our relationship? Had it be that lack of physical closeness - perhaps he hadn't wanted that lack of sex? He could have asked, then, and somehow I doubted for that particular need he would have been shy to ask, having heard how promiscuous I was with sex in the centuries before. Had it been, then, that he preferred the crafty mind of the youko that had prevailed in my younger human years than to this sentimental one?
What had I become blind to?
[You became imprisoned
Can I reopen the door?]
I knew that he didn't approve of my staying in Ningenkai because of my human mother, Shiori, but I had always supposed that he realized in the end that it didn't really matter because I would never change my mind anyway. I thought he had given up on that line of argument - but apparently not. Unless it was something other than that. I tried to think of any other long-running arguments we staged every time he found time to get away from Mukuro, and deemed all the rest unworthy of possible abandonment. In fact, the excuse of Shiori seemed pretty flimsy as well.
Something big. What had I been missing?
Most of all I feared that somehow I had been the cause of this. As a demon, I understood how the human world could change a demon's heart to good even if it was a corrupted as mine. I knew that Hiei refused all attempts to be "humanized", trying to keep his arrogant demon pride even when in Ningenkai, only tolerating human moderately. However, Hiei had been here enough times to have opened eyes and experiences; had his link to me somehow been strong enough to have let him recognize the face of humanity and its heart? Even now I could touch my heart and say very truthfully that I believed that I was human, perhaps not fully but certainly somewhat in spirit. I had always believed that Hiei would always remain the stubborn fire demon he had always been to me simply because he never believed in humanity. But if it had changed me, a demon with the will to steal, hurt, and kill innocents, then what of the habits of a surly fire demon?
I also knew Hiei enough that he felt conflicts of the heart sharply. Certainly a human development of the heart would be considered 'soft' in all his demon opinion (which was the one he usually voiced), but that was not to say there was no existing human heart beating inside of him. To feel that pull of both human and demon would have been suffocating for him when he could appease neither in his line of work. It would have been both an paradise and a prison to come to Ningenkai, where these human emotions grew and festered deep inside of a demon heart. Demons weren't meant to feel sympathy, love, nor any rudimentary emotions except anger. He would have went to Makai and stayed there, just to deny that his new emotions never existed (and knowing him, he probably would have been able to keep it that way). Then it would have been the demon inside of him completely dominant, and those human emotions would have been crushed. Yukina had probably been the only thing keeping him abandoning the Ningenkai at all.
As for the question whether or not he could see that human emotions were NOT a liability (especially when Hiei had me to cover his back), I could see that was conflict inside of him as well. Ningenkai had not done any good to Hiei mentally. He was now more confused than ever.
But why leave without telling me? It wasn't just for this one selfish reason that he would have left. He would have told me if that happened. . .instead he had simply told me that he wanted to cut ties. There was something bigger. I was sure of it.
I had been walking up the steps when suddenly I felt my heart lurch and stumbled into the wall. There was pain there, human pain of the heart, the final cry of desperation that Hiei couldn't hear because he was kilometers away now, but all the same it was my human heart and mind, screaming out as one. Hurt melted the edges of my world in cold heat, then shattered into a million pieces. Was this how it felt to fall in love as a human and be thrown away? In this case, it would have been better to have died seventeen years ago than to have found shelter in this frail form.
No tears came. I think I shed them all inwardly.
For once, my youko side was silent, watching the transformation of my human side from passivity and appeasement to clear crimson, unbridled anger that could have shaken the heavens themselves. But the motivation for my human side's anger was simply infused with demon pride and then with human determination. Perhaps it wasn't rather that the human was angry at Hiei, but rather at the fact that it could feel the betrayal as strongly as it did.
Only I, Kurama the not-youko-not-human, hung back a little. How quickly things changed. I could not remember a time when I had felt so angry. And while it should have felt refreshing to return to my demon state of emotion, at the same time I sorrowfully faced the fact that my human life, existence, this brief dream had ended all too soon.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / Author's note:
Good. I actually think I have a plot going. Yes, I know this chapter was very boring, lots of talk and deliberation, but I actually think I did a lot of development in this. I commend you to have reached the end of this with your head still in one piece *grins*. Hopefully I'll have the next chapter up soon.
Andrea Weiling
For a moment, I just leaned on the door and let the terrible truth of what I'd just done wash over me. But in an instant that was also swept away and I laughed in relief. He was gone, that intruder in my territory - that sensitive human territory that I'd just learned to use in the last seventeen years - and the youko inside of me fiercely hoped that he would never return. Though I could never do to him what I'd done to so many past lovers in bed (which was kill them), the youko inside of me could certifiably do it during the daytime. But even as I laughed, I backed from the door in the most cautious manner possible, not allowing myself to touch the wood any more than I had to. Already my thoughts were thinking more friendly thoughts towards entering and exiting through the window instead of the door. Weakness, that was what it was - by now, there was more than just a wooden door between the two of us, there were probably three kilometers as well - but that door represented everything that I had done to PUSH HIM OUT OF MY LIFE.
The human side of me shuddered and bent in self-pity, but the youko side of me was angrier than ever, at myself and at Hiei. How could a petty, low-life fire demon stroll into my heart like that? And more than ever, the youko was screaming at the human side of me, the one that somehow had become all the more influential in all matters of daily life in the past few years. That side of me was purely human; it was still growing like any human teenager would, with new ideas developing in that head and growing maturity all the time. The youko side did not share its experience with life with the human because still the human couldn't see how people could be cruel, unkind, could like causing themselves and other pain because in some morbid way it was beautiful, or that killing was always justifiable, from all points of view. Now, at the ultimate betrayal, the only thing it ever did was weep.
And Kurama, my not-youko-not-human-but-some-odd-fusion, wasn't willing to go either way. The best course of action, all three parts of my mind agreed, was to just resort to isolationism for a little while, and then make sure I never saw Hiei ever again. It wouldn't be all that hard, I supposed; I could politely decline any mission given by Koenma to the Urameshi Team that included Hiei (after all, there were several solo or duo missions given before) or request another partner, and I only had to keep Hiei away from my human counterpart, whose feelings for the fire demon would certainly grate against the youko's usual course of action. I only had to wait seventy or eighty years for that human aspect to die, of course, and then I would be able to return to Makai as Youko Kurama, in heart and mind.
Not that I relished the coming. I, as Kurama and as Youko Kurama, was afraid that returning to Makai would erase all traces that I had been among humanity, in so-described 'primitive' Ningenkai to all those demons in Makai, for an entire eighty or so years. This was an experience I didn't want to forget - surely, the dormant feelings of 'sympathy', 'forgiveness', and 'love' had been lost to me before and that was not the best thing I'd like to remember as the Youko, but the entire ride as a human being had been somehow a refreshing change. Perhaps it had been because I never had to run in this world - I never had to hide anymore with Koenma's protection over me (somewhat). At this thought, my youko side denied all charges - I mean, when did you ever see a demon who was bored of killing? - but somehow I had become weary of Makai along the way. Or, perhaps it was the emotions that I had felt as a human. I couldn't be sure.
Which brought us back to Hiei. The youko side slammed down the ultimatum: damn, he couldn't even say the "L" word, so he didn't mean anything. And slowly, the human side of me began to see what the youko was getting at. Only me, that not-youko-not-human Kurama, remained undecided.
I was a fusion of both worlds, for better or for worse. I had the sentimentality of a human but the cunning mind of a youko, and so it was hard to ride the ultimate path without appeasing my human side's want to never kill anyone. Of course, the youko had a stronger influence over the middle Kurama, but human emotional influence was there as well. I walked a very thin path in never wanting to hurt anyone but wanting to punish those who needed to be punished. Innocents could never be hurt or even witness my destructive power. And yet that inner sense of pride that the youko had, that damnably big ego, determined more of my actions than my human counterpart did.
[If you could only see
Like you did before]
But how in the world could I throw away something that I had wholeheartedly poured out my soul to do? To have finally arrested the courage, to have hardened my mind to the ultimate disappointment that might have cracked my human mind from the pain of rejection - I had survive all of that to find that Hiei did, indeed, care for me. That had been the peak of the human inside of me, all of those feelings had overtaken the youko's impulse to take and then run. The question lay rather in what Hiei was afraid of me doing - certainly I had suppressed the youko inside of me for so long in his presence, was he afraid of it rising up? But the youko had agreed with this truthful, close friendship like Hiei and I shared, as sentimental and human as it was (the youko usually disagreed with anything that involved being human); it had offered a new outlet for emotion that even youko's had to feel after a century or two.
My mind was shut, the thoughts milling like ants, spreading in every direction like running water. And suddenly I knew there must be something big that I must have missed along the way.
It was never like Hiei to leave me hanging like this. It was a clue, I knew this because Hiei, as blunt as he usually was, could be sneaky when he wanted to be. What did I have to see, though, that had diminished our relationship? Had it be that lack of physical closeness - perhaps he hadn't wanted that lack of sex? He could have asked, then, and somehow I doubted for that particular need he would have been shy to ask, having heard how promiscuous I was with sex in the centuries before. Had it been, then, that he preferred the crafty mind of the youko that had prevailed in my younger human years than to this sentimental one?
What had I become blind to?
[You became imprisoned
Can I reopen the door?]
I knew that he didn't approve of my staying in Ningenkai because of my human mother, Shiori, but I had always supposed that he realized in the end that it didn't really matter because I would never change my mind anyway. I thought he had given up on that line of argument - but apparently not. Unless it was something other than that. I tried to think of any other long-running arguments we staged every time he found time to get away from Mukuro, and deemed all the rest unworthy of possible abandonment. In fact, the excuse of Shiori seemed pretty flimsy as well.
Something big. What had I been missing?
Most of all I feared that somehow I had been the cause of this. As a demon, I understood how the human world could change a demon's heart to good even if it was a corrupted as mine. I knew that Hiei refused all attempts to be "humanized", trying to keep his arrogant demon pride even when in Ningenkai, only tolerating human moderately. However, Hiei had been here enough times to have opened eyes and experiences; had his link to me somehow been strong enough to have let him recognize the face of humanity and its heart? Even now I could touch my heart and say very truthfully that I believed that I was human, perhaps not fully but certainly somewhat in spirit. I had always believed that Hiei would always remain the stubborn fire demon he had always been to me simply because he never believed in humanity. But if it had changed me, a demon with the will to steal, hurt, and kill innocents, then what of the habits of a surly fire demon?
I also knew Hiei enough that he felt conflicts of the heart sharply. Certainly a human development of the heart would be considered 'soft' in all his demon opinion (which was the one he usually voiced), but that was not to say there was no existing human heart beating inside of him. To feel that pull of both human and demon would have been suffocating for him when he could appease neither in his line of work. It would have been both an paradise and a prison to come to Ningenkai, where these human emotions grew and festered deep inside of a demon heart. Demons weren't meant to feel sympathy, love, nor any rudimentary emotions except anger. He would have went to Makai and stayed there, just to deny that his new emotions never existed (and knowing him, he probably would have been able to keep it that way). Then it would have been the demon inside of him completely dominant, and those human emotions would have been crushed. Yukina had probably been the only thing keeping him abandoning the Ningenkai at all.
As for the question whether or not he could see that human emotions were NOT a liability (especially when Hiei had me to cover his back), I could see that was conflict inside of him as well. Ningenkai had not done any good to Hiei mentally. He was now more confused than ever.
But why leave without telling me? It wasn't just for this one selfish reason that he would have left. He would have told me if that happened. . .instead he had simply told me that he wanted to cut ties. There was something bigger. I was sure of it.
I had been walking up the steps when suddenly I felt my heart lurch and stumbled into the wall. There was pain there, human pain of the heart, the final cry of desperation that Hiei couldn't hear because he was kilometers away now, but all the same it was my human heart and mind, screaming out as one. Hurt melted the edges of my world in cold heat, then shattered into a million pieces. Was this how it felt to fall in love as a human and be thrown away? In this case, it would have been better to have died seventeen years ago than to have found shelter in this frail form.
No tears came. I think I shed them all inwardly.
For once, my youko side was silent, watching the transformation of my human side from passivity and appeasement to clear crimson, unbridled anger that could have shaken the heavens themselves. But the motivation for my human side's anger was simply infused with demon pride and then with human determination. Perhaps it wasn't rather that the human was angry at Hiei, but rather at the fact that it could feel the betrayal as strongly as it did.
Only I, Kurama the not-youko-not-human, hung back a little. How quickly things changed. I could not remember a time when I had felt so angry. And while it should have felt refreshing to return to my demon state of emotion, at the same time I sorrowfully faced the fact that my human life, existence, this brief dream had ended all too soon.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / Author's note:
Good. I actually think I have a plot going. Yes, I know this chapter was very boring, lots of talk and deliberation, but I actually think I did a lot of development in this. I commend you to have reached the end of this with your head still in one piece *grins*. Hopefully I'll have the next chapter up soon.
Andrea Weiling