Disclaimer: the problem with being an artist is that it's so difficult to make it in the world of artistry.
Brief Note: This is a loaded chapter, my friends. Loaded with…PCP. In the form of…explanations. For, like, everything Miru has done up to this point. She is one sick puppy.
Fall
Fit to befall the false memory
Facts begin to stall
Permitting the bleak existence, this is our time to discover
—Flaw, "Turn the Tables"
Chapter Fifteen: Here My Love
Kuwabara watched Yûsuke closely, seeing his friend's expression change dramatically.
"What're they saying?" he asked, lowering his voice to a whisper. Yûsuke looked at him with dread in his eyes.
"Let's say that I think in this circumstance, fighting is definitely better than talking."
Kuwabara felt the blood drain from his face.
Below, the action continued.
"I think," Kurama said slyly, "that you are obsessed with me."
Miru laughed scornfully, bearing her teeth. "Arrogant little twerp, aren't you?" she mocked, making a small effort to squirm free of his whip. Hiei thought feverishly with this new information; Miru was being difficult, that much was sure, but now things depended on her definition of "love." Probably warped, he thought, like everything else about her.
"Ah, it is the way of the fox to be vain, but I am right, aren't I?" Kurama tugged on the whip to tighten his hold. Miru bit her lip as the thorns pricked her skin.
"You think I still have any emotion for you?" she snarled, her eyes watering from the pain. This child was used to living in luxury, Hiei noted disdainfully. She had no right talking to Kurama about anything at all. Kurama himself did not seem to care, looking down at her with a maniacal glint in his eyes.
"I think you are obsessed with me," he said again. "I do not think you are in love with me."
Miru looked up at him, clearly perplexed. Hiei raised an eyebrow as well, but from his placement far above them, he went unseen.
"Oho," Kurama said knowingly, "and I'm right, I see."
"How can you be right?" Miru said sharply. "I don't even know what you mean!"
With a flick of his wrist, Kurama dislodged the whip from its bind around Miru, setting her free. Rivulets of blood leaked down her arms, but even as Miru pressed down on her triceps to stop the bleeding, Kurama paid them no heed. He coiled his whip nonchalantly and dropped it around his shoulder like some sort of handbag. Hiei almost cringed at his level of uncaring; this was unlike the Kurama who Hiei had always known.
"Do you know how obsession is defined?" Kurama asked, walking over to her with some variation of an amble crossed with a strut. He made a soft laughing sound and closed his eyes. "Of course you don't. You don't read dictionaries in your spare time. No, but I will tell you: 'a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.' Does that sound like something you would do?" Kurama smiled and made that laughing noise again. "Does it, Miru?"
Miru screwed up her face into something completely confused, drawing back the slightest bit as she took a step backwards and nearly slipped. Hiei smirked; she was uncoordinated. Either that was characteristic of her and it was a good thing, or she was being thrown off her game and it was a good thing, but potentially fleeting.
Miru drew in a breath and let it out slowly, gathering her thoughts. "I am not obsessed with you."
"But don't you see?" Kurama asked, making up for her retreat by stepping forward so that he was right in her face. "You are. You must be preoccupied with me; look at the traps you've set, the trails you've laid, the games you've played! You are unreasonable in your playtime because of one thing and one thing only: you have no chance. You will never win; I will defeat you, and even if you should somehow manage to kill me, someone will defeat you for me."
Miru gritted her teeth and sneered, shoving her face into his in a challenge. "We are to be fighting right now," she growled. "You have abandoned the game in favor of your words?"
Kurama grinned again and backed away, looking up dreamily at the bloody sky. "Merely sorting through details, darling. Don't be too concerned. Please."
Hiei nodded slightly, approving of Kurama's tactic. He was surprised at the sudden change in mentality; it seemed that being faced with Miru and the prospect of defeating her once and for all had an effect more drastic than anything Hiei could have done. Well, he mused, whatever worked.
And although he knew it was merely for sport, Hiei was a little annoyed that Kurama had called Miru "darling." Certainly, Hiei and Kurama were not a "couple," and Hiei had no claim to the wild fox, but still.
Of all things.
"Darling."
"Now Kurama's talking," Kuwabara observed, watching the players change their positions as the fighting stopped. He took a steadying breath before his next question. "What're they saying?"
Yûsuke looked over, his eyes slightly unfocused as he listened to the conversation below. "Kurama says Miru's obsessed with him."
Kuwabara frowned. "Nothing new there."
"Miru says she's not," Yûsuke continued. "But Kurama says that she's preoccupied with him and she's unreasonable because she can never win. If she kills him, someone will rise up to kill her for him."
"Oh, man," Kuwabara said nervously, peeking over the edge again and drawing back. "Does he think she'll kill him?"
Yûsuke shook his head. "He doesn't, but he's sure she's gonna die."
"Well, that's good."
"I guess."
Kuwabara took another deep breath. This was getting a little nerve-wracking for him, and sitting on the sidelines wasn't helping.
"Who said I was concerned?" Miru snapped. "I am not concerned." And she trilled a high-pitched note, sending tremors through the ground and forcing weeds up through the dirt to wrap around Kurama's ankles. The earth melted into mud and wrapped around his feet, anchoring him where he stood as it solidified. Kurama only laughed again, more confidently this time.
"I can see you are losing your mind," he said as his chuckling trailed off. Small sparks of pink energy spiraled down his legs and the weeds unwound themselves, re-weaving into a thin carpet trail before him which led right to Miru's feet. More weeds poked up to break apart the mud, freeing him easily, and then tied themselves into the others to widen the path. Miru frowned, her eyes narrowing.
"It's not supposed to be this way," she said coldly. Kurama grinned and winked.
"Ah, but it is."
"No it's not." And then she let out a long, low sound, rocking the ground more than before and making Kurama frown as he widened his stance uncertainly. Fire began to spring up, shooting out of previously sealed holes and forming something of a circle around Kurama. Hiei would have leapt down then to help if Kurama had not made it painfully obvious with his taunts that he did not want help until he was dead.
Now, the problem was not so much that Kurama did not like fire—he was in love with a firebaby, after all. It was more that in a fight, he usually gave Hiei all opponents who dealt with fire so that his friend could absorb it and use it for himself, and so that Kurama's plants did not burn. Admittedly, Karasu had set his plants on fire so many years ago, but that had been a long and hard battle, and one he did not care to repeat. But fire did not hurt him any more than another attack of the same caliber and a different element. If Miru thought that was the case, she would be sorely mistaken, but, Kurama mused, he might be able to use that to his advantage.
"Fire?" he said callously, using an inflection that did a poor job trying to cover fear. "You think you can stop me with this second-rate cage? A fox shows his teeth when he is trapped."
Miru cackled, enjoying herself. "You mean the fox spirit? I've dealt with him before and won," she said. "Bring on your worst, Yôko!"
There was no bright flash of light, nor was there any fanfare; one moment, Kurama had been trapped within the flames, and the next, Yôko stood there instead. He looked around calculatingly and faced a certain direction as if to jump over the fire there. At a specific moment, however, he did not jump over the flame as Miru seemed to be expecting him to, but back-flipped over the fire behind him and landed in a graceful crouch, dodging her next attack.
"A basic move," Kurama said with a smirk in his voice. "Perhaps you ought to spend less of your time gaining new tricks and more of it learning how to use them."
Miru growled and the ground shook again, sending clouds of stone towards Kurama from different directions. He merely danced away from them, his tail waving slightly. Miru noticed this and nearly screamed her frustration; it seemed that only Hiei noticed something about the fox's intentions that did not quite match his actions.
At that moment, Yôko's eyes darted to Hiei and back to the fight. The glance was so quick that Miru did not notice it, as she had blinked, and Hiei almost did not, except that he had been watching for something like it. It gave him a great confidence to know that Kurama knew where he was, but it also gave him a great unrest to think that Kurama was uncertain of himself and perhaps nervous about the fight. Hiei wanted to go down and help, he wanted it desperately, but even more he wanted to do what Kurama wanted him to do, so he stayed put and prayed that Kuwabara and Yûsuke would not leap down to join the fray.
Then something strange began to happen. The ground seemed to open up, cracking into fissures in several different places. For a moment, Hiei thought that Kurama was causing these breaks with some new power, but the fox appeared just as confused as Hiei, if not more so. Only Miru was smiling, laughing wildly, and Hiei and Kurama realized at the same time that she must be doing this for some reason.
The entire landscape began to change, the fissures becoming greater and greater splits until they had created great holes and little land was left. Miru sang another, louder note, and more earth fell away until only a small pillar remained where she was standing and Kurama was left clinging to the walls of the cliff. Hiei snarled, growling in his frustration.
That girl was beginning to cross a line.
"We've got to do something."
Yûsuke sat up, frowning, and looked down at his friend. "Are you serious? We can't do anything; Kurama would kill us! And if Kurama didn't kill us, Hiei would kill us!"
Kuwabara shook his head and sat up as well. "I don't care. We've got to do something, this is ridiculous! Miru just took away the ground, and Kurama's got nowhere left to go. This is beyond unfair by about twenty steps too many."
"I know," Yûsuke said tersely, "but Kurama wouldn't want us to, and since Kurama wouldn't want us to, Hiei wouldn't want us to, and so we're not going to."
"Man, don't you ever break any rules that aren't enforced by the law?"
Yûsuke frowned. "Uh, no. Why not leave them alone, huh? They're not hurting anybody who doesn't totally deserve it."
Shaking his head, Kuwabara lay back on his elbows, abandoning the drama below for the moment. "Do you ever lose any sleep at night over anything?"
Shrugging, Yûsuke returned his attention to eavesdropping, even though the only real noise was Miru's howling laugh at Kurama's sudden misfortune.
Kuwabara closed his eyes tightly, trying to block out her piercing screech. He really needed to get a hobby.
Kurama flattened himself against the cliff wall, clinging to it by driving his claws into the stone. Lucky he had them; why hadn't Miru done this when he was in his human form? No matter, he needed a way out of his current predicament.
"I've trapped the fox!" Miru shouted to him. As though he couldn't hear her, he thought ruefully. "I've trapped the fox," she said again, "and no one's coming to your rescue! I guess that answers the question of whether your little firefly loves you, don't you think?"
Kurama frowned. "Don't speak of things you don't understand, child," he said, his tight predicament giving his animal instincts a bit of an adrenaline rush. "You've still not told me who you really love!"
"You've still not told me who you think I really love!" she returned tauntingly. "Come on, losers first!"
"Oh, I have no intention of being the loser," Kurama muttered, "but I will go first, for your sake."
"Oh, thank you so much."
"Mm," he said vaguely. "I think…you have never known love at all."
Miru gritted her teeth and shook her head several times, quickly, like a small child about to throw a tantrum. "I have!" she shouted, enforcing the impression. "I have! My mother loved me very much, and so did my brother!"
Kurama nodded, closing his eyes calmly. "Of course they did. But the love you speak of is of a different sort, is it not? You speak of the love between lovers. You claim to possess this bond with another, and I challenge you to that. You have never felt such a thing in your life!"
Miru jumped in place, then stomped her foot. "I have!" she said again. "I am in love with another this very moment! How dare you challenge that, you fiend?"
"No," Kurama said, shaking his head. "You are not, and I will tell you exactly what you are feeling. What you are mistaking for love."
"I am—"
"Hush now," he continued dangerously, a fierce glimmer in his eyes. "Simply listen. You feel not love for me, but a desire for revenge. Just as you convinced me that I was responsible for the fiasco that nearly cost you your life, you very well convinced yourself, but for a different reason: You needed to believe it in order to cleanse your conscience! In order to keep sending me those messages, in order to keep evading capture, in order to teach yourself the way of the Choir Song, in order to kill those who tried to capture you or drive them to madness or even take them as your own slaves, you needed to believe you were right."
Hiei nodded as he listened. Kurama was making more sense than he had made in the last three or four years combined. Miru was shaking her head rhythmically, trying to deny the facts as she heard them.
"No, no, no, no, no," she repeated over and over, clutching her hands around her ears. "It's not true, it's not!"
"You do not love your slaves, that much is obvious," he said wryly. "We need not even touch upon that. But who does that leave?"
"It's not true, it's not true!" Miru screamed, falling to her knees.
"The poor child," Hiei said, descending the cliff in a single jump and landing beside Kurama as if he had been there all the time. "Delusional, I believe."
Kurama smiled slightly, looking at Hiei out of the corner of his eye. "You know, I believe you're right."
"You're lying!"
"Am I?" Kurama asked then, turning his attention back to Miru completely. "That leaves only the little firefly."
"No!" Miru screamed, sounding as though she was being tortured. "You think I'm in love with him? You're mad!"
"I don't," Kurama said, "which is precisely the point. You do, but I do not. And, I gather," Kurama continued with a glance at the firefly in question, "neither does he."
"Then what is it?" Miru cried, more of a wail this time, slightly desperate. She grabbed her own hair and began to pull it, her elbows bent inward to cover her face. Kurama and Hiei nearly pitied her, but, remembering all she had done, felt their hatred intensify instead.
"What is it?" Kurama asked, toying with her as he began to enjoy himself. The corners of Hiei's mouth tilted slightly in the shadow of a frown; Kurama wasn't the sadistic one. What was this, exactly?
"Please, tell me," Miru whispered, huddled in on herself and peeking up at them through her hands. She truly did look pathetic.
"It is jealousy."
Hiei blinked. Jealousy? Of all things, he thought. As far as he knew, Miru thought Kurama's love was unrequited. Of course, it wasn't, but what did she have to be jealous of, believing the lie as she did? Unless, of course…of course. She knew. She knew Hiei loved Kurama, and she knew that Kurama knew it. She saw their furtive glances; every time their eyes had met, unseen, she had known. She had been watching and she knew. She always knew. Her secret power was, perfectly, keeping secrets.
But why jealousy? How? Hiei looked at Kurama and waited for his prideful smirk to dissipate into further explanation.
"You know that I love Hiei." Kurama frowned momentarily at this news being gathered by such a demented source. "You tell me that he does not love me in return, but why? No," he raised his hand to stop her as she was about to answer, "don't speak. You don't know why. I will tell you: it is because you know he does. Your entire life has been wasted trying to convince me of a crime I did not even commit. Even the chance at a shred of happiness would destroy all that you have tried to build me into, so you needed to steal it."
"I stole nothing!"
Hiei scoffed and Miru began to cry. Kurama merely shook his head.
"This is true, in the matter to which we are referring," he admitted. "But that does not mean you didn't try. You tried hard, in fact, and failed. Even if you do not realize it, you tried your best. But why Hiei? I have many loved ones you could have exploited; it could not simply be because he was here with me. No, the reason is even simpler: you want to end this. You do not want to continue hounding me any more than I want you to! You are young, Miru, and you are getting bored. This game has been going on for years and years, and you may well have found a new target by now. In your desperation to end the game, your mind, which could not handle losing, oh, no, that mind of yours tricked you into thinking you were in love, of all things."
"No," Miru said with a desperate certainty. "No, that's not true. I'm in love and I know what it feels like, I know what I feel!"
Digging his nails deeper into the wall, Kurama laughed shortly. "I thought you said you weren't?"
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
"Trying to throw me one last knife, dig in one last wound, you tried to begin your game anew with the wrong pawn, didn't you? You tried to grab Hiei, tried to fool him and drive him mad in the same way you did me. But you didn't quite count on him not falling for your tricks, nor did you count on me coming in for one last standoff. This is the end, Miru. This chapter of your game is closing, and it is the last one to ever be written. Simply because it has not ended in the way you wished is no reason to try and hold it open. Give up, child. You are pathetic."
"No!"
With one final, desperate scream, Miru called a towering wave of fire from the pits of the Earth and flung it up before Kurama in a massive wave. He could do nothing but gaze up at it with a mild fear, though age made him calm and accepting of the death that the flames were sure to bring.
Hiei looked at Kurama anxiously. Could he help him? Save him? Should he? What would happen if he did? If he did not?
The flames began to fall, and Hiei braced himself to run.
Kurama looked at him with sad but resigned eyes. Hiei drew in a shocked breath, filling his lungs with heat.
Kurama was ready to die.
Kurama wanted to die.
He could stop it all. He could save Kurama, his friend, his love, who wanted to die.
He could.
But he was running out of time.
Mini-note: I feel that I deserve a cliffy. I haven't had one in awhile and I'm in a right state, so I'm sorry, but I'm sure you think you know what's going to happen next and I'm sure some of you are right.
