Disclaimer: you know that new Superman movie? Full of flaws. Totally full of them. Batman rules.
Fall
Crying to sleep is my
remedy
urgently trying to stand on broken / confused legs
Am I looking for reasons not to be happy
emotions catch up with me / I'm too fast for them
—Poison the Well, "Mid Air Love Message"
Chapter Eighteen: You're Surely Missed
Such loud, ferocious tones were not typical of Kurama, and at the vicious question, Hiei could not help but fall silent. He shook his head slowly, disbelievingly, his eyes wide and unblinking. Kurama seethed.
"Do you?" Kurama asked more quietly. "I have nothing left, Hiei, nothing. I have no reason for being and you want me to stay alive merely for you? For some love you claim we share?" He scoffed, arrogant and childish. "You…you know nothing, nothing at all!"
"But that's all you have left, isn't it?" Hiei asked in a small, sensitive voice. "You have nothing, you said so yourself. Then do I understand what you've got?"
Kurama laughed angrily, his disbelief clear and his annoyance more so. "Meager wordplay!" he shouted, turning around and throwing his arms up as if to embrace the sky itself. "The games of a child, the games you play, you silly, silly boy! Oh," Kurama turned back to Hiei with fire in his eyes, "you think you can fool me? This old fox, fifty times the wiser man than you, and you think you can fool me? How can you?" Then the insanity was back, Kurama's demented clown's face wild and demanding. Hiei recoiled at first, then stepped forward firmly and planted his feet several steps apart to balance his stance.
"I know you're being incredibly selfish and arrogant," Hiei said confidently. "You think that simply because I am younger, because I have not lived all the years you have lived nor learned all the lessons you have learned, you can learn nothing from me. But this is not true—you can learn from me, just as I can learn from you."
Kurama nodded dismissively, shrugging his shoulder in an exaggerated fashion. "Of course," he said. He jolted then, making a small "Oh" sound as Hiei grabbed his shoulder and turned him roughly.
"This," Hiei said, gesturing at Kurama's head, "is not the Kurama I know! This is not the man I have fought beside, and this, oh, it is certainly not the man I might have loved. What are you doing to yourself? You are arrogant, you are wild, you are terribly, terribly different from Kurama! Why is it so hard for you to continue living? There is so much more you could learn!" Hiei was holding both of Kurama's shoulders tightly now, nearly shaking them but not quite. "How much do you know, even?" he asked with the smallest hint of desperation. "Words, games, facts? Lessons? Life? This all is nothing if you cannot learn the things that will keep it all in a proper order. You must learn humility, Kurama, and not only the humility of defeat. You—"
Despite his red hair and green eyes, Kurama grabbed Hiei's chin with sharply clawed fingers and tilted it so that he and Hiei were looking into each other's eyes. Kurama's mouth was set firmly, his eyes dark and cold.
"I," Kurama began sternly, "cannot continue this charade any longer. I know I am small. I am weak. I am insignificant, I am irrelevant. Pathetic, in the grandest scheme of all things. My knowledge is limited to that which I was permitted to learn by my experiences paired with my underdeveloped sense of self-righteousness and greed. This is little, and it is badly edited compared to all that I could know, all that I should know. Living among humans for so many years, I have come to see all things in this way: pointless. No one man really matters, and I, not even a man, cannot raise myself to importance above this. My debts to humanity have been repaid, and I am ready to take the step I should have taken years ago. I am ready to accept my defeat. I will no longer cheat the primal force that is death."
Hiei tried to shake his head, but Kurama's grip was too strong and he merely jostled it. Feeling the motion, Kurama closed his eyes and grinned.
"But what of love?" he said philosophically. Fear crept into Hiei's heart and he listened as closely as he could. "What of this infatuation, this temporary obsession?" Kurama scoffed, tossing his head. "Ha. This is nothing. This is a broken heart glued together by hopes and shards of dreams, waiting to be broken again." Kurama released Hiei's jaw, looking out behind him at the horizon.
"You would let one bad experience ruin any chance at loving again?" Hiei asked, rubbing his chin.
"No bad experiences," Kurama answered casually. "I have never had the misfortune of falling in love."
"Until now."
"Until now." Kurama breathed deeply, sighing. "Well, maybe not."
Hiei glared dully. Kurama could not be toying with him again; that would be vile. And they had already established that Kurama loved him, hadn't they? Hiei could have sworn.
"It's a possibility," Kurama said with a shrug. "I have literally survived hundreds, hundreds of years without love, although I have been faced with the proposition many times. I wonder if I can love, and I wonder if fox spirits are meant to love. I wonder if I felt not the obsession masquerading as love but a mere comfort, a desperate need for such a strong presence as yourself during my instabilities over these last few years. If I mistook such a thing for love, you see."
"That," Hiei said haughtily, "is nonsense." Kurama looked at him skeptically and Hiei shook his head. "If I can love, then you can love. All demons are technically capable of such a thing; your definitions of it as an infatuation have kept you from thinking this way."
"But love is fleeting," Kurama insisted.
Hiei cast his mind around for anything he could use to further his argument and landed on a sorry human cliché. Maybe it would do for the time being. "Have you ever heard that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?"
"But you and I both will have loved and lost, whether I die or not," Kurama pointed out. "Besides, I've always thought that phrase was rather stupid. How could it be better to have known the joys of love, then lost them, only to surely go about the rest of one's life trying to find them again?"
"But you say one would tire of them," Hiei challenged. "One would tire of love. So why would it matter?"
"But then why bother?" Kurama shot back.
"No," Hiei said, suddenly realizing something. "You aren't doing this right. You ask the pointed, obvious question 'why?' I ask the endless question 'why not?' But you can't answer that, can you? You don't know why not."
"I've told you—"
"—nothing," Hiei interrupted. "You've merely repeated yourself over and over, telling me the same thing a couple of different ways."
"More than a couple."
"Ah, ah, perhaps, but regardless." Hiei would have grinned in a lighter situation, but he knew he was winning—finally—and could not sacrifice that for anything. Kurama threw up his hands.
"All right, fine," he said tiredly. "You win. Are you happy with yourself?"
"I won't be until I learn what I've won," Hiei replied, arrogant now.
"Oh, please, Hiei! I don't know!" Kurama spun on his heel and sat on the ground, his head in his hands. "I'm so tired of knowing everything, I have no idea! Please, don't ask me anymore. Please. I never want to know anything, ever again. I never want to answer another question."
Hiei shook his head, sitting across from Kurama and staring at him intently. "I'm asking you simply to answer me this," he said softly. Kurama looked at him through his splayed fingers, his eyes desperate and sorrowful. Hiei smiled a gentle, crooked smile. "Is that why you want to die?"
Slowly, only a small bit, Kurama nodded. "I know I don't know everything," he said, his voice quiet and further muffled by his hands. "I know I have no hope of learning it all. I know I was stupid, arrogant, rash. I really was suicidal at times, probably. But I am so sick and tired of being myself, and of tipping scales to favor my real self, my false self, and the self that I am in between; I am tired of being labeled and fawned over and talked about, and I'm ready to give up. I've done all I wanted to do with my life; I'm finished."
"Everything except living it," Hiei said crassly. Kurama shook his head.
"No. I lived the only way I knew how, and it's too late for me to learn any more. Too late for me to change my life, anyway. You remember Yomi, don't you?"
Hiei nodded. Of course he remembered Yomi; how could he not?
"You remember the story behind our relationship?"
"You weren't romantically involved," Hiei said suspiciously, suddenly wanting to make sure even though he knew it was practically impossible. Kurama smiled softly and shook his head.
"Of course we weren't. But you remember the story, don't you? He wanted to go after something right away, all by himself, and I warned him not to? It was far too dangerous a mission for one man alone, especially one so young and altogether inexperienced as he was at the time."
Hiei nodded again. He knew all of this, but would let Kurama retell it anyway.
"He went anyway." Kurama laughed hollowly, a frightening sound. "It was what I would have done in his position. They were all like me, in their way. Ignorant, you know. Such similarity kept us all together… They thought I understood them. They thought I understood myself, as did I. It was stupid, I know, I know."
As if Hiei had been about to tell him as much. Hiei scoffed, but did not interrupt.
"He is still brash, albeit less so. It has taken the creation of a son for him to even begin to calm his mind, and that had to be done forcibly and artificially. It has taken the stealing of an innocent creature's body and soul to even begin to calm my mind, which, in a way, is the same. A new life partly my own and partly different. Several years passed in this new body before I even had the chance to calm my mind, but then it all happened in a flash and I've realized everything. Now I admit it: I've lost. I give up. Please, Hiei…I want to take a rest."
Another repetition, but at least Kurama was still trying. Hiei leaned back on his hands and closed his eyes, trying to look into Kurama's soul with this new insight. He saw little at first that he did not already know, but looking deeper, as deep as he could manage without being overwhelmed, he began to open his heart and open his mind and he saw new and different things. He saw not Kurama, disillusioned and arrogant, but Kurama, old and worn. He saw not Kurama the thief, but Kurama the man, the man who had just used not weaponry but wordplay to defeat perhaps the most fearsome foe he had ever known. Fearsome not for her strength, but for her power, her potential, and…her similarity to him. Hiei opened his eyes, blinking at the suddenly too-bright light. Kurama hated and feared Miru because she was so similar to what he had been. Not exactly, of course (as, to the best of Hiei's knowledge, Kurama had never taken slave prisoners or led such wild goose chases with the intent of taking a living trophy), but Kurama had harped and obsessed in his day over particular heists and those behind the loot. He had been naïvely conceited and bored with his games from time to time, needing to end them to start new ones. It had not been until his rebirth, or even until Shiori had caught him falling off a ladder at the cost of her own skin that he had learned any sort of meaning to life.
He saw, he realized then, only what Kurama wanted him to see. Kurama had been orchestrating their conversation from its inception and finally, as Hiei thought back on what had been said and what he had drawn from it, he knew that Kurama truly did want to die. Kurama could not see any alternative and that was the path he had chosen. It would be up to Hiei to let him go his merry way, taking his own life (or letting it take itself, he mused, though he had only begun to suspect the barest hint of that option based on Kurama's comments), or hold him in his mortal place, helping him live out his days in one of the living worlds. Kurama was being foolish, thinking that death was the only option. It was far too simple, anyway, and the thought of one who was stupidly overconfident that he had disproved all other paths.
But in his way, Hiei was stupidly overconfident as well, and having found love for the first time, he did not want to give it up without a fight. After long musings, he shook his head in response to Kurama's plea and reached out to grasp his friend's shoulder.
"Not yet," he said warmly, offering a false sort of eternal comfort. "We'll see what we can do about your hatred for love, Kurama, but I don't think you're ready to give in just yet."
Kurama smiled weakly, nodding as he saw through Hiei's misspeak. Shouldn't he have said "I don't think I'm ready to give you up just yet"? Or even just, "I don't think I'm ready for you to give up just yet"? Yes, of course. But for now, Kurama would play along, and they would see how things turned out. "Shall we go speak to Yûsuke and Kuwabara?" he asked, changing the subject quickly and successfully. Hiei nodded as well.
"They're probably wondering which of us has killed the other," he said with genuine derision. Kurama laughed.
Hiei smiled.
---
"…when's 'later'?"
Kuwabara frowned, shaking his head. "I don't know. I would've thought they'd be back by now; you don't think—I mean, you don't think one of them killed the other, do you?"
Yûsuke's eyes bugged out and he shook his head effusively. "No, no way. It couldn't be. It couldn't, could it?"
"I hope not."
"What kind of thing is that to say?"
"I'd say your entire conversation is irrelevant."
Yûsuke and Kuwabara looked each in different directions several times before directing their gazes to the edge of the cliff where Hiei and Kurama stood, Hiei's posture perfect and his hand fisted cockily on his hip as Kurama smiled, trying not to laugh. Hiei raised his eyebrows.
"Much like the noise that comes out of your mouth normally."
"Hiei!"
"Kurama!"
Then, in unison and with joyous expressions, both younger men leapt to their feet.
"You're not dead!"
"Eh?"
Kurama's mouth opened in a small "o" and he tilted his head, politely and cutely confused. Hiei rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, leaning back slightly on his heels. Yûsuke and Kuwabara were over to them in a flash, both grinning brightly as if some great battle had just been won. Neither knew that it was far too early to celebrate. Even Hiei, who had an idea, did not know quite how early.
"Kuwabara was saying he wondered if one of you killed—"
"You thought they might have, don't deny it!"
"Who's denying anything, dumbass? I'm just saying what happened!"
Looking up at Kurama, Hiei closed his eyes exasperatedly and sighed, a clear "What are we going to do with them" expression. Kurama smiled knowingly and nodded in return. For a moment, everything was absolutely normal.
If anything, it should have tipped Hiei off.
But it didn't.
---
Technically this is the last chapter but there will be an EPILOGUE! And it will be full of magic and leprechauns and pixies and Katie Couric and okay you caught me, not really. But there will be an epilogue to wrap things up once and for all. It is EXTREMELY (I can't stress this enough) unlikely that this sequel will become a trilogy. In fact, I'm pretty sure it won't. I'd say 99.5 percent sure. Leaving 0.5 percent available for an extreme unlikelihood.
Oh yeah, by the by, this chapter is technically about 450 words short of my self-imposed goal of 3000 words per chapter, but I've been padding it out for days and I simply couldn't fit in anymore.
"Shiori had caught him falling off a ladder at the cost of her own skin": this was edited out of the American dub. When Kurama was little, he broke a plate as he fell off a ladder and Shiori caught him, the plate shards falling on her arms and cutting them badly. This is why she was in the hospital during the Three Artifacts saga. In the American dub, she was said to have a "potentially terminal disease."
