Di: I borrow and remain in debt.

A/N: I always thought Kuririn would dabble a bit in horticulture, what with being a monk. Either him or Yamcha, anyway, if only just to see a bad-ass ex-bandit planting a tulip. The 'rime' in the title is a bit of a play on words, used both in reference to the synonym for 'frost' and the old-fashioned spelling of 'rhyme'. To those of you who review, may the wind always be at your back.

Dedicated to SnowEyes, my most faithful reviewer, who really does have no idea just how much she's helped me to fly.

This FFN Edition, first published in 2003, contains the unabridged text of 'Gold and Rime' as originally published in Volume II of 'Jinzouningens and Humans of Chikyuu; A Quest of Love' as told anonymously. This copy is devoid of any annotations prepared specially or otherwise for performance and may be used in its entirety with permission. 

Manufactured on Chikyuu, Chikyuu Publications, Inc. 47 West 4th Street, West City, C.Y, 22975

 

--gold and rime

     unabridged

She could go for days without thinking about him. Weeks, sometimes. Juunanagou was an exhausting person to be around, after all, and was therefore perfectly capable of distracting her from almost anything whether he desired to or not. Juuhachigou hated and loved him for it. Juunanagou was a person with very little direction and was actually quite easy to please; now that they had stopped killing humans, or perhaps because of it, he received a profound pleasure out of killing other things.

His favorite parts of the games were the chases. She would watch as he stretched out in the air, as comfortably and effortlessly as if he were sitting on a lawn chair, tossing nuts into the clearings with a flick of his wrist. The squirrels would come then, furtive as shadows, seeking them with tiny, quivering noses. He would lift a finger and toss a bolt of ki in their direction. If he was feeling mischievous, and this of course happened more often than not, he would go on the hunt, shooting the ki in such a way that it forced them to run in circles to avoid them. The squirrels in particular would squeak the loudest, paws digging up tiny dirt clods with every turn and misturn, and if they lasted long enough, which they usually did not, they would end up shuddering in the grass, trying futilely to blend with scenery that did not match them. He then would shoot a ki blast through their heads, neatly and pitilessly.

He did the same thing with chipmunks, and rabbits, too, when he thought to vary what it was he tossed. They would all suffer the same indignity, ears and tails growing increasingly ragged and singed as the blasts rained down time and again. He never tried chasing the raccoons, though. "Too slow," he replied when she asked, and had blown on the tip of his finger lightly, winking at her. "No sport in it."

It was not the killing that bothered her, or that he got such great amusement out of a game so grisly. What bothered her was the fact that animals continued coming back to the clearing, regardless of how great the smell of blood or the stench of the burned fur of their brothers became. One after another they would creep back in, paws groping, movements cautious and jerky, and he would play again, and again, relentless. It was the innocence that bothered her. 

But there were times when he did not play, and she was thus rendered free from distraction. In those times, zooming over the ocean for the sixth or seventh time, aimless, would think of him again. His trembling voice, his pitiable, shaking knees, his wide-eyed near-panic: Kuririn should not have been anywhere near that battle, let alone in it; he was little more than another body, a vigilante, too pathetic to fight and too stupid to run away. His weakness sickened her.

And yet, when the sun flickered irritably at the horizon, and her pace slowed enough so she could see the land below her clearly, she could feel his presence from across the world, like a midnight sun. She would feel it, and let her fingers lift to linger over the spot the detonator had been lodged, and with every fiber of her being desperately wish for it back.