"Trigger"
by Acey
Disclaimer: Disclaimed. I'm fortunate enough to not own much more than a couple of brain cells.
It was the usual today, the fist fights, mostly one-on-one sorts that involved all the punks on the streets from his house to the junior high school. They were dropouts, or soon to be dropouts—the case was unclear to Kuwabara and he was not particularly inclined to find out. They followed after him no matter how he tried to avoid them, when he did at all, like dogs to the trail, barking to incite him. Then they would leave him with his friends, his blue school uniform stained with blood.
But he had gotten them back, and double. He knew of only a few souls he had not managed to pound into the ground, and only one who had deprived him of a title that would never be in the yearbook superlatives—toughest kid at his junior high. Yusuke Urameshi, the only kid he fought daily because he wanted to.
He punched like a demon, insane, wild. He had never had much in the way of martial arts training, if any at all—but some skills go untaught, like the virtuoso pianists and the old masters of painting. Urameshi was like that in his own twisted way, his crude, unpolished mastery of the fight making it somehow more frightening to behold.
The rumors went their way until he had almost become the stuff of urban legend, too contrived to even contain a kernel of truth—three gangs were said to have asked him to join, perhaps even lead them; he had an army of punks that pledged complete allegiance to him and would eventually topple the school's government before moving to more important conquests.
And so the only fight Kuwabara insisted on having was with him, the fight against the odds, an idealized version of the fights in the old boxer movies, perhaps—or Sir Galahad against the dragon.
It was less simple than that, though, less black-on-white. Yusuke was not evil, he was just a symbol, a sort to point out in the school annual with a "See this punk? He's the only one my age I can't beat in a fistfight. But don't you worry, I'll get him." Perhaps he had always forced the enmity upon Yusuke with every yell of his last name, every hapless challenge.
And perhaps he was not Sir Galahad, the knight in shining armor, off to defeat whatever villains stood in the way of pretty damsels, with strength as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. His heart was not pure, not the perfection he had wanted, and the damsels in distress would rather laugh at him than let him try to help. Even the dragon was not a dragon but a delinquent. There was none of the old steadfastness he wanted, no one to dictate what was good and true and should be respected instead of reviled, and no one to condemn that which was wrong.
The world did not go the way he wanted, and so he fought Yusuke daily.
It would start simply. Today Yusuke had had a glint in his eyes even before he yelled out his request, for what reason he didn't bother finding out. Yusuke pounded on him as hard as ever before he could manage much more than a punch. He tried to get up, to fight him back, but it was useless as always, like a dog's frenzied attempts to catch a squirrel that had bounded up a tree.
He could bark all he wanted, but Yusuke would never come down and be defeated.
In a moment it was all over. His face had hit the asphalt for the last time, bloodied, bruised. Yusuke stood up, said something over his shoulder that could have been a sarcastic "better luck next time" before he sauntered off. His gang told him the score, a pitiful number, and not for the first time asked him to quit.
His response was the same, dogged and stupidly perseverant. He cursed Yusuke Urameshi's very existence and grudgingly allowed his friends to help him get up from the pavement.
…
Kuwabara was back at his house within fifteen minutes, after waving his friends away and assuring them he would be fine. He'd skipped school again, though Shizuru was getting on his case about that—had been for awhile. Though it wasn't like he was going to become a scholar or anything, he figured. Give someone else a chance, maybe. Not like Sarayashiki's that good of a school to go to.
His sister's response would probably be something along the lines of "Give who a chance?" but he didn't care.
The phone rang. He grabbed it, grateful for the distraction.
"Hello," he said.
"Kuwabara."
The voice on the other end of the line was taut, almost fearful. He heard the sounds of little kids squabbling in the background, but he didn't need that to know who it was.
"Okubo—what's happened?"
"I—I just heard about it. The punk you always fight, that Yusuke Urameshi… he's dead, Kuwabara."
"What?!"
Okubo hesitated, and at that moment Kuwabara knew it in the deepest part of his mind, knew it but refused to accept it.
"He—they said he was just walking on the sidewalk and he saw a little kid in the middle of the road, and a car coming. He took off and pushed the kid out of the way. Car ran over him instead."
A sick wave of nausea came over him, the disbelief overriding it.
"He can't be dead. He's not dead." His voice almost cracked as he clutched at a last hope. "He's not dead, do you hear me, Okubo?! He can't be dead! He can't be dead—not while I still need to fight him—still need to beat him. He's—"
"He's gone." Okubo drew in breath to say more, but Kuwabara interrupted him, vehement, searching for a way to keep the reality at bay, keep Yusuke alive.
"He's not gone, I tell you! We'll—we'll go to the wake, everybody, Sawamura, everybody—and I'll prove it. I'll prove it!"
His mind was racing, wild, bordering on insane. Yusuke was so stupid, so incredibly stupid. How could he have thought that dying could make it right, every day he'd fought him, every day he'd returned home with a half-broken nose, cut up, uniform ruined? Yusuke was even more of a fool than he had thought.
Dying wouldn't make them even. A car couldn't dictate whether a simple fight on the sidewalk near the school happened or didn't happen, whether a rivalry ended or was dropped in midair. Kuwabara could count on that now in his mind, as he had counted on the day he would defeat Yusuke, as cults put all their faith in empty rituals to prevent apocalypse.
If he could only come to the wake and coax Yusuke to return, he could not die.
Kuwabara ran outside to the pavement, going past houses, apartments, and finally streets themselves. He heard cars start up and go past but tried to ignore the sound, pretend it wasn't there.
He knew where he was going. There was only one funeral parlor nearby, and he had gone past it a thousand times at least in his life, some days on the sidewalk, fighting, and when he was younger, playing by the small park across the road from it. It was a misplaced little structure, a one-story brick, at odds with every other building nearby, with the inevitable dark sign in front, should anyone mistake it for a home.
He looked up and read it for probably the first time in his life. There was no advertising or need to advertise, only the last name of the family that owned it and the name of the place. The inside would have the same blankness about it that was supposed to be comforting, plain. There was no point in trying for even the façade of cheerfulness in a place like that, so the family had not tried.
Kuwabara started for the door, not realizing the obvious—his gang had waited for him, known he would try to come because of his conversation with Okubo. They had come to prevent it, thinking it was a disruption, disrespectful. They didn't know.
They tried to grab him and drag him away, pulling his arms back, shouting "It's a wake, Kuwabara, you can't do this!" forgetting that he was the fighter of the group, forgetting his stubbornness, forgetting. He grabbed the doorknob, pulled it with his friends still attempting to hold him back, then down the hallway, until he saw what he expected, the door ajar, the people crowding around, Yusuke's mother in tears in a corner. And the body. Yusuke's body.
He didn't notice anything about it except that it was there. It was there, and that meant half of his work had been done. Yusuke would get up—he only needed to coax it and the body would breathe again, he would pull himself off the ridiculous stand and fight him like he always had—savage, unrelenting, like death itself.
He began to yell at it, curse it, but still it would not move, still it would not get up. No animation came to Yusuke's face but he still continued, calling him every despicable name he could think of, trying the magic incantation of his biting words again.
His gang was yelling again, too, trying to hold him back, saying to stop it and trying to make him remember where he was. In the back of his mind he heard some of the teachers muttering at this, and some schoolmates, angry at his disturbance. His friends pinned his arms down then, finally catching him, started to drag him away from the scene, still spewing curses in despair, pleading, as though Yusuke would respond a final time after all.
By the time they had pulled him out the door he could not deny it again, not in his words or even to himself.
The dragon was slain, the long battle finally won in the last way he would have ever wanted. A demented kind of deus ex machina and Urameshi was finally the one on his back on the pavement, battered, bloody, but gone.
There would be no more of the fights, the crashes into the pavement with a bloody nose and being pulled up by his gang as he watched Yusuke stride away without a scratch. No more taunts to make him angry in the only way another fighter ever could. No more of the grand, vain daydream images in his mind of the knights and dragons. No center in his life, like a gun without a trigger.
There was only himself to reckon with now.
finis