Living Once Again
By: Sorano & Sanomi
Sorano's Note: Okay obviously I did something wrong because reviews for chapter one were at an all time low in my history of posting fiction. That is SO sad. (cries) But I will persevere! This will be one of the most popular fics in the YYH category with the help of you my readers who review and recommend my story. Thanks, ahead of time.
Chapter Two
"You're too thin Yusuke!" Keiko announced, pinching his arm. "Look at this, I can pull at your skin. It's practically hanging off of you!" Brown eyes angled down as she looked worriedly at him. "You have to eat something."
Botan,cotton candy blue hair and bubblegum pink kimono, closed in on him until she was right in his face. "I can pack all my clothes in those bags under your eyes," she quipped, but there was concern in her eyes as well
"Yeah, Urameshi, you could use a dive at the local fast-food place." Kuwabara yanked Yusuke's head back by his hair, putting his face under the strict light of the newly changed light bulb in his room.
Yusuke's eyebrow twitched, and his hands clenched into fists. "I'm FINE!"
His three friends jumped back a safe distance away. Botan waved her hands appealingly, "Sorry, sorry, Yusuke, we just thought you didn't look well."
He stood up and kicked at a pile of clothes on his floor, "Yeah, I get that I look like death warmed over. Oh! That's right, I am." He growled under his breath and stomped out of his room, nearly knocking over Kurama, who was coming down the hall.
The fox-vessel's quick reflexes saved the tray of tea he had been carrying to Yusuke's room. Kurama moved out of the way to let Yusuke pass, as it seemed no one was going to stop the detective from doing exactly what he wanted. Kurama watched after him, tray in hands. Keiko, Botan, and Kuwabara stuck their heads outside Yusuke's room, one over the other arranged by height, as they stared after Yusuke as well.
There was definitely something wrong with the spirit detective.
Yusuke stopped in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, grabbing the first things that came to his hands-- which happened to be a beer and poptarts. He plopped down on a stool, not even bothering to wonder what poptarts were doing in the fridge and opened the box. "See! I'm eating!" He said around a mouthful of pastry, waving over his head the one he had taken a bite out of.
"Beer and poptarts, Yusuke? Really." Kurama walked back to the kitchen and snatched the beer can before Yusuke could protect it. "You'll get sick. You need more nutritious food if you plan to recover, then you can be blatantly stupid about the things you eat." He smiled lightly, but the look he gave Yusuke was disappointed.
The spirit detective didn't meet his gaze, staring down at his feet, and swallowed the bite of poptart with difficulty.
Kurama sighed and put the beer back in the refrigerator, exchanging it for milk that was still a few days from developing into a sentient being. Then he put it back, after giving it a startled look.
To hide his discomfort, Yusuke grumbled about nosy friends as he ate the poptarts. Puu, having come with Keiko, sat on Yusuke's head and chirped happily at having his perch back. The little blue bird-like thing was like a stuffed animal and its presence only made Yusuke grumble more about squishy playthings using his head to sit on.
Botan pulled herself onto the kitchen counter that marked the boundary from the hallway and the kitchen. "Anyway, about that mission."
And that was the real reason everyone but Hiei was in his house. Botan had a new mission and everyone had to know what it was about so they made sure they knew what he was getting into and where he would be going.
"I don't feel like it." Yusuke said distractedly as Kurama put a reasonably safe glass of orange juice in front of him, pushing it closer to suggest that Yusuke drink it. Theliquid sloshed a little in the tall glass. Did he really need to drink that much? A nod from Kurama said that he had better. So he chugged it down.
"Yusuke! You can't just not take this mission. This is important! Lord Koenma classified it as a class A." Botan slammed down the file that she had pulled from one kimono sleeve.
"I still have the right to refuse, don't I?"
Kuwabara picked it up before Yusuke could. "Hey! This looks like four missions in one."
"Bingo! But it's more like one mission broken into four parts. You see there are four artifacts that Lord Koenma needs to put in the Vault in order to keep the Mortal, Spirit, and possibly Demon Worlds safe. He's been accumulating information on them since way before we were born. Well-- I think you were a teenager when he started, Kurama." She smiled at the red-head.
Kurama got a whimsical look in his green eyes, "So a little less than three hundred years?"
"Bingo. And these artifacts are really important Yusuke! If they fall into the wrong hands then it could be really disastrous."
"Like how it would have been disastrous if those Artifacts of Darkness had gotten into the wrong hands-- which they did-- and they were in the Vault to begin with?" Yusuke asked with venom lacing his words. Kami, he did not feel like doing anything. He wanted to go to bed, he wanted to sleep forever. But at the same time, he didn't want to sleep because he didn't want to dream anymore. Puu chirped.
Botan flinched in response to his biting comment. "Well, this is different. The Vault has top-notch security now."
Kurama gave a short laugh.
"Stop that!" Botan complained, eyeing the fox.
Keiko snatched the file from Kuwabara. "Disks?" She held up a picture to look at it more closely, "You want Yusuke to get a few little disks?"
The grim reaper shook her head quickly, "They're not just any disks! Those are the Incarnates, four powerful objects made by higher beings that existed a long timeago. When Spirit and Demon Worlds were new and the Mortal World wasn't even a beginning thread in the grand design of the universe. There's this whole creepy legend that goes along with it. It's in that file, just in case you wanted to know. You know, knowledge being power and all."
"There's a lot of information here Botan, this will take a while, won't it?" Kurama took the file from Keiko and inspected it, Yusuke watching furtively. Whatever hisfriend thought about it would help make Yusuke's final decision on the whole mission.
When Kurama's eyes widened, Yusuke perked up and tried to read the file too. "It looks like for once you're going to be doing detective work, Detective." Kurama's lips twitched up in a smile. "There are still many pieces to each puzzle missing, and it seems this one about the Light Incarnate is the most lacking of clues."
"Light Incarnate?" Yusuke's poptarts sat on the counter, abandoned.
"The four Incarnates represent four influences on the universe. Light, Dark, Power, and Wisdom. The most information we have is on the Power Incarnate, but the Light only has a few vague references and a sketchy informant." Kurama passed a photograph to Yusuke. "Botan, what's this sheet here? It looks like brail."
The photograph handed to him showed carvings in white rock. Black lines drawn on the photograph outlined the lines carved in the stone, making it easy to see four etchings of what were probably supposed to be the Incarnates. All they looked like to Yusuke were four circles with diamonds inscribed into them. Another photograph that Kurama absently handed to him showed a different carving, outlined in black marker, of some sort of spherical device.
"That's what we thought at first but it's supposed to be characters in a language. Probably of those higher beings."
The fox held up another picture for everyone to see. "And the statue of an angel?" The statue, made of some kind of white rock like the one with the carvings, was a male angel with his wings outstretched as far as they would go, clothed in fabric that bunched at his shoulder and fell over the rest of his body. He held his right hand clenched into a fist over his left shoulder and his left hand was closed at his side like the statue had once held something heavy, though there was nothing in the hand now. The statue's back was impossibly straight. The skin around the angel's soulless eyes was carved in a way that made the angel seem aloof but stern.
"Part of the clues?" Botan shrugged, "That sketchy informant is the only informant we have for all four Incarnates and he said that was the statue that holds the Power Incarnate, and that the other ones would be with or taken from similar statues. It's in the report."
"Look, Yuyu! It's a falling angel!"
He looked up to where Maori was pointing to in the night sky. He didn't see anything that was falling. "Huh?" He shivered a little, it was cold. Scooting a little closer he managed to get under Maori's arm so she hugged him to her.
"Don't worry, Yuyu. There's supposed to be lots of falling angels tonight. Miss Teacher said so." She patted him on the head.
Sitting on the roof of their little, beaten, brown car they waited for his mother to come pick them up. She had left them with the car while she went with a stranger-man to a station. She said that the car needed gas for them to go anywhere. His mother would be right back, she promised. Until then, Maori said they could watch the sky.
He watched the poor sky that had holes in it after being pricked with needles of light from the sun. Maori told him to keep looking and in the next minute saw the falling angel. It was a line of white, streaking across the sky. "Angel!"
"Yusuke!" Keiko cried out.
"What the--!!" There was a crash as Yusuke and the chair he had been sitting on collided with the floor. Puu flapped around in a circle before settling in Keiko's arms.
Four faces looked down at him with even more concern. Yusuke, still half stuck in his memory, could only mutter "Ow" and close his eyes. Their concern about him was wearing very thin on his already fraught nerves.
Then there was a pounding at the door--
"Yusuke?"
She looked down at him and smiled, "Almost to the house, Yuyu."
Someone helped him sit up and he made the effort to massage the memories away by rubbing at his temples where the ache of a headache was starting to build up. "I'm fine." No, he wasn't.
"Are you sure?" Botan asked.
Giggling laughter sang in his ears and he looked up.
He had never been so unsure in his life. Yusuke blinked slowly, shook his head a little to rattle around the metaphorical rocks in his hollow skull, and sighed deeply. "Yeah I'm sure. So where do we start, Kurama?" The last bit was to hopefully get back on the subject of the case and off the subject of Yusuke.
Kurama took Yusuke's spacing off in stride, a little used to it by now. The red-head looked at the file, sifted through it, and finally pulled out a thick section of it. "Retrieving the Power Incarnate would be our best bet. The location of the statue has already been given to us."
"And where is it?" He asked from his position on the floor. Yusuke wasn't really inclined to move any time soon; he didn't have the energy.
Acting as if he didn't notice the detective sprawled across the kitchen floor, the fox replied nonchalantly, "Rome, the capital of Italy."
"Rome!" Keiko's shout rocked the empty juice glass still on the counter. "You can't go to Rome! That's so far away!"
Kuwabara scratched at his chin, "Well, the Spirit World is pretty far away too and Urameshi's been there. I don't know how I'm going to get the time off from the body shop though."
Botan nodded, "It is a bit of a trip, isn't it? I wonder if Lord Koenma will spring for plane tickets for all of us."
Chewing on her bottom lip, Keiko nodded to them. "I can put aside a little of school. A week at most."
Oh no. Were they actually thinking about what they were saying? Apparently, they had all forgotten one very important fact. Yusuke made the effort to stand up, finding the energy from somewhere. The movement had everyone's attention by the time he had gotten his expression into the most pissed look he could muster. Keiko and Botan were instantly wary.
"You are not going anywhere." He said to Keiko, "And you have dead people to escort to Spirit World." Botan cringed. When Yusuke turned to Kuwabara, the idiot opened up his mouth, ready to argue. Yusuke was having none of it. "And you aren't even an official Spirit Detective, you have a job, a damn kitten to support, and your powers have been off lately so you wouldn't be help to me anyway." Kuwabara's ugly face set into stubborn determination. "No."
"You're going to do the case by yourself, Yusuke? That's a lot of work and it takes smarts to be a real detective..." Keiko trailed off as the room became suffocating.
Out of all the years he had known Keiko, he didn't think he had ever been so angry with her. Correction: He had never been remotely angry before when it came to her. Annoyed with her, yes; worried about her, yes; had been occasionally frustrated with her, of course, Keiko was one of the most frustrating girls on the planet. But he had never been genuinely angry.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Keiko. I know I've never been the brainiest, but I'm not entirely stupid." Look at where he had ended up for high school. He had to have some sort of smarts to pass that entrance exam. "And I never said I was going alone. I asked Kurama where 'we' should start."
Kurama, having been perusing the file and reading everything in it while the confrontation had been going on, finally looked up. "Yusuke is quite right. You three have your lives and jobs to do and none of you have any obligation to help. Hiei and I, however, work for Koenma and have been officially been apart of Yusuke's team since the Tournament. We'll be with Yusuke, don't worry." His gaze went to Yusuke. "Detective, calm down. You don't have enough energy right now to spend it on getting worked up. They're just used to helping and being with you, that's all. They want to make sure you'll be all right. Feel flattered that they care."
"Right." Yusuke righted his chair and sat on it once more, exhausted once more once the anger had drained way. "Right." He repeated more for the sake of convincing himself.
Botan perked up once more. "Well since I don't get to go with you then, I better give you something." She reached inside her kimono sleeve and pulled out a sphere of glass. "Spirit Detective item number fifty-two! The Orb of Finding."
"How's a ball of glass supposed to find anything?" Kuwabara poked it, making it roll in Botan's hand.
"When you fill it with spirit energy, it will activate and follow your command. Just tell it to find something and off it'll go."
"So why didn't Pacifier Breath use that to find the Incarnates?" He took another bite of poptart and grimaced at the stale bread taste and fake strawberry filling. At least he was eating.
The Grim Reaper frowned as she rolled the orb in her hand. "Because it can only follow really simple commands like, 'Find a place to hide' or 'Find the TV remote' and you have to be really specific when you tell it to do something or it might find something you didn't want. Say something obscure like, 'find money' and it will find the wallet in your pocket. And even then, it only hovers in the immediate area of wherever the target is. Try to tell it to find an Incarnate of anything and it would break with the number of possibilities."
Yusuke grunted, unconvinced. Puu chirped a little and wiggled out of Keiko's grip to flap over to Yusuke and sit on his head again. He chirped a little more and gripped Yusuke's hair tightly.
"What's wrong Puu?" Keiko tried to take him back.
Puu chirped, cooed, and flapped his stubby wings at her. "Puu-u-u-u!" The spirit beast was determined to stay on Yusuke's head and make a fuss about it.
Unfortunately, Yusuke knew exactly what the little blue ball of annoying cuteness wanted. "Stay with Keiko."
"Pu-u-uu!" More flapping and yanking of Yusuke's hair.
Yusuke slumped in his seat and rolled his eyes upwards, "You're not coming with me."
Puu chirped indignantly.
"Fuzzball wants to go with ya, huh? Why don't you let it?" Kuwabara picked up one of the poptarts Yusuke hadn't started on yet and chowed down.
"I'm not taking him with me." It was like an unspoken agreement that Keiko would keep him so that she always knew how he was feeling, though oddly, lately the tiny spirit beast hadn't been reflecting Yusuke's feelings, health, and mental state at all. He wondered slightly about that.
'He hasn't been around you enough. He's losing his connection to you.'
"What do you mean he's losing his connection?" Yusuke looked around the group in his kitchen, trying to figure out who had just mumbled that mumbo jumbo.
Kurama immediately went from casually detached from the conversation to deeply concerned. "Yusuke, no one said anything about connections."
"Someone said something."
The four of them watched Yusuke like he had gone mad. Puu chirped.
'Take him with you.'
Yusuke didn't see anyone move their lips.
"Great, this is just so fucking great. I'm going to bed." He stood up and shoved away from the counter. "Kurama, you can tell Hiei about this. I'll catch a day of zees and then we'll figure out what to do tomorrow."
"All right, Yusuke. You shouldn't have any trouble sleeping. The sedative should kick in another minute of two." Kurama said with a calming smile and hidden laughter.
Yusuke stopped before disappearing into the hallway. "The orange juice?"
A nod.
He left his friends and went to his room, carting his spirit pest as he went. Now that Kurama mentioned it, he was getting sleepy; he just hadn't been able to tell between induced sleep and the state of exhaustion that wore on him these days. Closing his door behind him, he collapsed onto his bed. More memories flittered like butterflies through his head as well as the comprehension that what he had heard was a separate voice in his head that was in no way his own. He was asleep in an instant, with Puu making a nest of the sheets beside Yusuke, and he dreamed about falling angels and stupid disks called Incarnates.
Kurama had to calm down Botan and Keiko who had immediately started chattering about Yusuke's strange behavior. The girls didn't understand and Kuwabara was just as lost as they were. He contemplated telling them what was wrong with the detective, but he didn't know if Yusuke would approve. If the younger boy had not said a word about it to his closest friends, then it most likely meant he didn't want them to know.
The again, Yusuke was endearingly stubborn when it came to revealing anything about himself. The only reason Kurama had ever gotten him to talk was because he knew which buttons to push and at what time. Yusuke being too exhausted to guard against personal questions was also a large factor.
He ushered them out of the Urameshi's small apartment and sent them on their way, promising to tell them when the team was planning to leave. None of them questioned why Kurama stayed and closed the door behind them. He did though. He wondered why he would care so much. His debts to Yusuke had been paid long ago.
Atsuko still wasn't home from wherever she went during the days. Yusuke was alone with a tiny blue bird that wasn't good for much of anything besides looking cute. Yusuke was essentially defenseless while the sedative kept him under. If any demons in the area sensed Yusuke's weakness then the detective would be in serious trouble.
The files lay half-read on the counter where he had left them. Picking them up, he went over the information. A hunch told him that the mission wasn't at all what it seemed.
Hours passed and Saturday afternoon fled to make way for evening. Kurama worked over the file, having organized the information into relevant piles and made significant notes. A call to the airport and a delve into his and Hiei's funds from Spirit World had secured three tickets to Rome and a long distance phone call snagged them a hotel reservation. The hotel closest to the museum was almost booked to capacity, leaving only economy priced single bedrooms to reserve.
When Atsuko didn't show up at six o'clock, Kurama decided to put away the case and check on the detective.
One look inside the room showed him what he wanted to see. Yusuke was in a deep sleep and didn't look as if he were suffering bad dreams, though the random eye movement suggested he was dreaming something.
"Like a mother hen."
Kurama turned smoothly and let the bedroom door click shut. "I was wondering if you would come find me when I didn't show up for dinner."
"Hn." Hiei, the third member of the Spirit World Team was a fire and ice demon. Hiei's height—excluding thehair—reached to Kurama's elbow, but being small in stature didn't mean the demon was any less deadly. Maybe more so. His small height was made up for by incredible speed and precise sword skills.
"We have a case." Kurama nodded in the direction of the kitchen.
"I know. Koenma told me."
"Do you want to read the files?"
"I just want to know when we leave." Typical little demon. Clever and quick, Hiei wasn't the type to dwell on details unless it suited him.
"In about a day. Let him sleep first."
"Hen."
"I don't think I've ever leaned toward a gender change, let alone a species change. And how can you relate me to a chicken when foxes are notorious for making lunches of them?"
Hiei's dark red eyes glinted, "Hn."
Kurama sighed. Hiei never was a conversationalist. Oh well. "We're taking a plane by the way." The other demon went stiff for a moment. "Don't worry, Kuwabara won't be there so you can be as afraid as you want to be."
"I'm not afraid of heights." Hiei defended as he followed Kurama back to the kitchen. "I like heights."
"I never said you were afraid of heights." Kurama smirked slightly. No, Hiei wasn't afraid of heightsHe was afraid of flying.
The trip to Italy would certainly be entertaining.
Sanomi: (blinks) My it feels odd having an author's note in someone else's story... well, there's always a first, ya know? Sorano here claims that I'm her co-author-- but we all know that's not true. She comes up with most of this stuff herself. I'm just the editor and occasional sounding board. The one thing I am responsible for (and proud of) would be the nearly-sentient old milk. XP