Crimson Threads and Gold

Heh... Yami no Matsuei is unquestionably the property of Matsushita Yoko-sensei, being as how I can't draw a straight line with a ruler.

A/N: Um. This story is predominantly based on the manga rather than the anime (just in case there are any questions...), and is a futurefic, i.e. post-Kyoto and post-GensoKai. It's also probably going to be pretty fluffy, since I'm writing it as a semi-break from the Great Big Angsty Fic of Doom That Ate My Life. So, fluff, romance, and snuggliness. Oh, and slash. Shounen-ai! Technically speaking, I'm going to call this slash since it's not always going to conform to yaoi conventions and stereotypes. Also, please note it's going to stay PG-13 for a while, but I am anticipating some NC-17 material in the future, which will be posted elsewhere in the form of 'extra scenes.' At that point, anyone who's legal and wants it can email me.

Crimson Threads and Gold

Chapter One – Little Earthquakes

As soon as he stepped into the room, Hisoka felt himself turn pale. It was bad enough being in the hospital to begin with; the only way he had managed to make it this far through the building was by throwing up the strongest mental barricades he could manage and reciting the alphabet silently in his head. So many people, so much pain and fear and worry... He concentrated on building imaginary walls around himself, trying not to think about the very real physical walls that had once enclosed him, kept him confined. Those times were gone; relics of his life that need no longer affect him. He was free now – to an extent.

A gentle prod between his shoulderblades startled him into a stumbling step forwards, and Hisoka turned to glare back at Tsuzuki. His partner grinned at him unashamedly and slipped past into the little room, trenchcoat hanging unnaturally still about his incorporeal form. Hisoka, resisting the temptation to snap at the idiot not to touch him – especially not when he was already so overstretched – steeled himself to move forward into the little ICU chamber. Every step he took eroded his barriers a little further; the emotional level in the room was high, although there was only one occupant. The emotions themselves were subtly different from the general morass of the hospital, and Hisoka frowned a little. There was pain, yes, murky and grey-black in the background, but it seemed more of a spiritual pain than a physical, and it was dominated by a fear so intense that he could practically reach out and touch it. And something else, just below it – resignation? The spiky yellow-green of the fear clouded everything, but there was a hint of something duller, just beneath the surface. Surely, if she's dying, she shouldn't be so afraid. By rights, she should be unconscious...

"Is she conscious?" Tsuzuki was standing at the head of the bed, surrounded by the whirring hospital monitors, and looking down at the pale, still form of the young woman who was hooked up to them. At Hisoka's question he looked up; he was wearing his 'helpless' expression, that blank, slightly sorrowful face that said there was nothing he could do for this person, no way he could save them.

"No. She's fading fast." Tsuzuki's voice was quieter than usual, subdued in the hushed way that people always seemed to speak in hospitals. Hisoka remembered... No. Not now. His partner gave a tiny little shrug that echoed the resignation and guilt Hisoka felt from him. It always hurt Tsuzuki when the young ones died, especially when they clung so hard to life. Sometimes Hisoka wondered why he stayed in this job, when it cost him so much pain.

"Ironic," he commented thoughtfully, trying to put his finger on just what about the scene felt so wrong to him. "That we chased her halfway across Kyushu for the past week – and now that we've finally found her, she's dying already." At least it's better than having to kill her, he thought privately. I know how much it weighs on you – and you won't let me carry any of the burden for you. This way, the soul would return to Meifu without their intervention – and without adding to Tsuzuki's pain. Sometimes, Hisoka wished that there was something, anything, that he could do to heal the wounds that he knew existed beneath the other's outward calm – but when he was unable to heal himself, how could he help others? Those wounds had their roots deep in the past, and all Hisoka had by way of experience was sixteen short years – sixteen years of loneliness and fear and pain. How could he help anyone, bearing the stamp of Muraki's creation within him?

"Hmm." Tsuzuki was looking down at the girl again, and Hisoka followed his gaze. Kamari Reiko, read the nametag at the head of the bed, just as it had been printed at the bottom of the case list Tatsumi had handed the Kyushu Shinigami as soon as they had arrived back at the office. The secretary had looked positively distraught at the number of cases which had piled up in Area 2 while they had been in the GensoKai, and it had only been through Tsuzuki's pleading that they had been allowed to get a night's sleep before starting off. Reiko's, though, had been the last case on the list, and Hisoka – perhaps naively – had anticipated a fairly easy job of finding out why she was refusing to die despite the rare and undiagnosed brain illness she was suffering from. Instead, the case had turned into something reminiscent of a mystery novel; the two Shinigami had arrived at the tiny village where the Kamari family lived only to find that the subject of their investigation had disappeared several days previously, to the consternation of her family. Finally (through more luck than judgement on Tsuzuki's part, Hisoka was certain) they had traced her to Nagasaki, only to be contacted by the Gushoshin with the news that Reiko had been admitted to hospital two hours earlier after a traffic accident.

Now, Hisoka though bleakly, her death was assured; her body was too injured, too damaged to let her survive. She was fading already, and it was probably better this way than slowly, later, in pain. At least now whatever pain she felt was beneath the level of her conscious mind; he could see the narrow tube of the morphine drip snaking its way down her forearm, could remember all too well being attached to one himself. Pain and fear, and three long years of dying. It had been here, in Nagasaki, that he had realised the truth – had been allowed to remember the truth by his murderer, by the man who had imprinted his own patterns onto Hisoka's body, had broken and remade him. Some day, Muraki would pay for that, along with all his other crimes, but there would be no vengeance for this girl. By all accounts, the accident that morning had been Reiko's own fault; she had run out into the middle of a busy intersection during the rush hour, and the van which had hit her had been unable to stop in time. Strange, after such a time spent avoiding it, that she should precipitate her own death in such a manner. Stranger still, this level of fear...

"That's it," Hisoka blurted, realising at last what it was that was troubling him. Tsuzuki looked up curiously.

"What's what?"

"There's so much fear – she's so afraid, even though she should be unconscious, and it's not fear of death. It's something else, something that scared her so much that she ran out into the road without thinking." Hisoka frowned, sensing without needing to look that Tsuzuki was wearing his serious face again, all traces of childlike exuberance subsumed in the powerful Shinigami. There was something... He closed his eyes, trying to sift some meaning out of the emotions swirling through the room, but they seemed to slip though his grip like water.

"Can you get anything else?" Tsuzuki asked urgently. "Just what was she afraid of?"

Hisoka shook his head minutely. "Not on the surface. I'll have to go deeper – if you think it's that important?" He looked up at his partner, knowing without question what the answer would be, but dreading it with all his heart. His own spirit senses were telling him that something about this case was very important indeed, but he was selfish enough to wish desperately that he not have to do this. Once he let his shields go, especially in such a place, it would be harder than ever to build them up again, and the prospect of opening himself to so much pain...

"It's that important. Can you do it?" Tsuzuki's eyes echoed the concern Hisoka could feel from him. Concern for himself; it still astonished him.

"Yes, but I'll need you help. If I can't... If I'm unconscious for longer than ten minutes, or if I get trapped as she's dying – you'll have to bring me back." Hisoka clenched his fists hard, then opened them slowly, breathing heavily.

"Okay. How do I do that?" Tsuzuki wanted to know, the concern deeper than ever. Hisoka shrugged as lightly as he could manage.

"Shake me, hit me – whatever works."

"Okay," Tsuzuki said again, somewhat nervously, but Hisoka had already stepped forward and laid his now-corporeal hand against Reiko's unbandaged arm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hisoka looked so pale and still. Of course, being Hisoka, he was always pale – unless he was angry, when bright spots burned across his cheekbones and a fey look entered his eyes – and usually pretty still, too. This stillness, though, seemed unnatural; he was slumped across the bed where Kamari Reiko lay, his hand still clamped around her unmoving forearm, and Tsuzuki couldn't tell whether he was breathing. Of course, it wasn't as if he technically needed to, being a Shinigami, but it felt wrong and Tsuzuki didn't like it. Seventy years in the Shokan Division had sharpened his spirit senses incredibly, and over the past couple of years he had got used to the sense of Hisoka's presence. To have it suddenly gone was a little disconcerting.

Of course, he told himself reassuringly, it wasn't that Hisoka was gone completely, he was just submerged in the Kamari girl's consciousness. Soon he would open his eyes and sit up, and then Tsuzuki would suggest that they go and get something to eat, and Hisoka would make one of his usual disparaging remarks... It would be all right.

Tsuzuki shifted on the plastic hospital chair, reminding himself to watch the girl rather than the young Shinigami slumped beside her. He disliked hospitals just as much as Hisoka did; they brought back far too many painful memories. Still, his gaze kept slipping back to his partner. Shouldn't he be waking up by now? Tsuzuki wondered, absently picking at a loose thread in his sleeve. Just as the thought crossed his mind, the monitors surrounding the bed began flashing and beeping urgently, summoning doctors and nurses from the outer ward.

Panicking, Tsuzuki grabbed Hisoka's limp body by the shoulders and shook him urgently. Nothing, except that his head wobbled back and forth on his neck like a day-old chick's. Cringing, Tsuzuki shook him again, harder, then slapped him gently across the face, calling his name, but there was still no response. He could hear running footsteps in the corridor; soon the hospital staff who had been 'distracted' by the Shinigami on their way in would arrive. There was nothing else for it; heaving Hisoka's inert form over his shoulder (and hoping desperately that separating him from Reiko wouldn't cause any more problems), Tsuzuki stepped away from the bed at the same time as he whispered the activation cantrip of the fuda charm he had slipped from his pocket. An invisibility fuda; it wouldn't last long, but hopefully it would give him enough time to bring his partner round and get both of them the hell out of there. If Hisoka was still tangled up in the girl's mind when she died, Tsuzuki didn't know what would happen. He didn't particularly want to find out.

As the doctors rushed in to begin attempting to resuscitate Kamari Reiko – an attempt Tsuzuki already knew to be doomed to failure – he studied the unconscious form of his young partner. Hisoka was breathing, but only barely. Shaking hadn't worked...

"Come on, Hisoka, wake up!" Tsuzuki begged. He had to do something! Screwing a tight lid on his protesting conscience, he lifted his hand and hit the slight boy sharply across the face – once, twice – as hard as he could. Still no response at all. Desperate now, he clutched Hisoka to him. He could feel Reiko's spirit slipping further and further away, beyond the living world and towards the boundaries of Meifu. The idea that she might be taking Hisoka with her filled him with irrational panic – for surely Hisoka, being already dead, could not be harmed by repeating the transfer. Tsuzuki looked down at the blank, unseeing face and tried to work out what to do. Hisoka was an empath...

Come on, feel how worried am about you! Come back – come back to me! ...To me... Acting on reflex, out of pure instinct that he would never be able to understand or explain, Tsuzuki bent his head and pressed his mouth against Hisoka's.

Afterwards, all he really remembered was a moment of softness and warmth before Hisoka's body convulsed weakly and he began to cough. Overcome with relief, Tsuzuki backed away hastily and tried to reinforce his emotional barriers. Best not to mention that little incident, even if Hisoka had said to do anything he could; it would only embarrass the boy, and there was the chance that he might read more into it than simple desperation. Considering Hisoka's past, that wasn't something Tsuzuki wanted, and it would only make trouble between them. He had decided not long ago that Hisoka was the best partner he'd had in years; he was certainly the longest-lasting. And after all – it had done the trick. Happy again and smiling hugely with relief, Tsuzuki reached out to prop Hisoka up, the memory of his partner's words in Kyoto sliding through the back of his mind.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Pain. So much pain. And fear – fear to drown in, smothering him, pulling him under no matter how hard he struggled to remain himself. Images borne on the sea of yellow-green-black-grey emotions; a reaching hand, a shadowed face, a bird shot in the wing, arrested in flight. They faded as everything else was doing, as he could feel himself doing, turning to ice and slipping beneath the surface... He panicked, struggling desperately against the tide that consumed him, but it was so cold now, the chill weighting him down, and he knew that soon there would be nothing left...

Warmth. Sudden warmth enclosing him, softness and heat of gold and crimson pulling him back to himself. And suddenly his pain was his own, he was himself, back in his own mind and heart and body, shaking and coughing and being propped up like a sack of potatoes by his partner.

As soon as he could physically manage it, Hisoka pulled away from Tsuzuki's supporting strength. I have to be strong. I can stand on my own. "How long was I unconscious?" He was dismayed to find his voice came out on a croak.

"I don't know." Tsuzuki shrugged, watching him worriedly. "Not long; ten or fifteen minutes." Hisoka opened his mouth to snap something at the idiot and then winced and felt at his face gently. The entire left side felt as though he had walked into the door.

"You hit me?"

Tsuzuki actually blushed. "I'm sorry. You said to try anything."

Well, if it worked... "Do we need to stay here any longer?" Hisoka asked hopefully. His head was pounding from the effort of trying to keep so much out, and he was so tired he felt like falling over where he stood. Behind them, the doctors were slowly shutting down the monitors around Reiko's shrouded form, preparing to take her body to the morgue. Hisoka could feel their disappointment and sorrow so rawly that it made him wince. "Can we go back to Enmacho? I can tell you what I found out once we're there." And besides, the journey would give him time to work out just what exactly he had found out.

TBC