Warnings: None
Lucky Child
Chapter 07:
"Supposed to Be"
As I put the cap back on the bottle of disinfectant, I asked Yusuke, "Who do you fight?"
"Hm?"
He sat on my bed, rubbing the bandage on his cheek. Beneath it lay a shallow scrape. It wouldn't scar, but it must've stung something fierce. Looked like he got it by face-surfing on the pavement. Yusuke whined and groused every minute I spent patching him up. You'd think he'd never felt the sting of disinfectant before, but I knew better than that.
I'd been patching him up more and more as the years went by. We were almost 10 at this point. The fighting had started as early as 7. Just people in his class at school, at first, but then kids from other classes and grades. On the playground, in the street on his way home from school, in the neighborhood. Kids he knew. Kids he didn't. Kids his age. Kids older still. I wasn't sure why he picked who he picked. No rhyme or reason I could see.
Did he get off on it?
Did he enjoy making people bleed?
He hadn't seemed purely sadistic in the anime and manga (just a surly teen with an attitude, a short temper, and a twisted sense of humor), and he didn't seem sadistic now (not when he pouted, eyes watering, as he tolerated my ministrations), but with my strange new influence, I feared I'd somehow changed him. Perhaps that was irrational, since I'd seen no concrete evidence of any changes. Perhaps it was paranoid, given all he was doing was fighting people just like he did in the anime…but I needed confirmation that this was all OK. I needed occasional check-ins to make sure I hadn't irreparably ruined the lives around me.
Uncertainty had gnawed at me since the fighting started. Since Yusuke first came home with torn knuckles and a busted chin. Since Hiruko told me I'd been breaking the rules. Meeting Kuwabara had set the need for confirmation into overdrive, too.
Soon he and Yusuke would meet. Soon the fighting would begin in earnest.
Soon the shit would hit the fan.
I needed to be prepared…and I needed to know that my rule-breaking, minor though I thought it was, wouldn't irrevocably damage the world I'd come to call my own, or hurt those I'd grown to love.
I'd been sticking as closely to the rules as I could, since meeting Hiruko. Acting as close to the real Keiko as possible—doing what she'd do, liking what she'd like. Hiruko had told me to keep breaking the rules, but something about his cheerful attitude didn't sit well with me. I'd always found overly cheerful people untrustworthy in my past life.
Was Hiruko right, in telling me to keep breaking rules and just be myself?
Or should I stick to Keiko's script, against his wishes?
I wasn't sure. All I knew is that I couldn't hurt Yusuke. I'd come to care for him too much for that.
"Who do you fight?" I repeated. "Random people? Boys your age? People you know? Strangers? People who piss you off?" When Yusuke gaped at me like a drowning fish, I pressed on. "Why do you fight the people you fight, Yusuke? Why do you pick them, specifically?"
"What the heck are you—?"
"I'm worried, Yusuke. If you're out there picking fights with anyone you see—"
"N-no—you're wrong."
Teeth worried his lower lip, mouth twitching below wide eyes. He looked anxious, I guess. Unsettled by my questions, like it was the first time they'd ever been posed...even by himself.
"I don't fight with just anybody, Keiko," he said, and his eyes widened further stull. Was it just me, or did he seem surprised by his own admission? He nodded, vigorous. "Yeah. Not just anybody."
"Then who?"
Suspicion colored his expression. "Why do you wanna know?"
I got up and put the first aid kit back in its spot under my desk. How to phrase this? Didn't want to send him running…but then again, subtlety wasn't his strong suit. No kid gloves for my Yusuke, no sir.
I turned back to him. I put my hands on my hips. I scowled.
"You don't bully people weaker than you, do you?" I asked.
Yusuke blinked—and then he lurched off my bed, onto his feet.
"No!" he yelped. "Jeez, Keiko! No! I just…"
Yusuke, talkative though he could be, had never been good at expressing things like emotions or internal thought processes. Bless the child—he'd grow to be a man of deliberate action, not a man of precise elocution. He fell silent under my stare, fidgeting, unable to meet my eyes.
Slowly, afraid he'd run, I sat on my desk. I caught his nervous eye. I smiled.
"Take your time," I told him.
To my frustration, the little shit took my advice. I had to wait almost two minutes for the kid to come up with something and speak. Took everything in my power not to snap at him to hurry the hell up and just talk, dammit.
When he did talk, my impatience eased. It was like watching the sun come up, understanding of himself dawning in his eyes word by word, spark by self-aware spark.
"I fight people who want to fight me," he said, in a voice of wonder. "Only them."
"How can you tell when someone wants to fight you?"
"There's this look." Pauses peppered his speech as he tried to make sense of himself. "When I see it, I just know. It's real. And I know what it looks like." He shrugged, smirked. "Other times, we piss each other off, and it happens. We fight."
"So no little kids or old ladies."
"Well, if they picked a fight with me, I'd kick their butts. But they'd be no challenge so there's no point."
"You're telling me you'd never go over to someone and just beat them up for no reason."
"No." He looked surprised at me. "That'd be mean, Keiko."
"Well, I'm glad you're not mean."
He turned up his chin, smug. "Damn right. And besides. There's no fun in fighting the weak. You can't get stronger if you always fight people weaker than you."
I turned away. Rearranged the pens on my desk for no reason, just so I could smile where Yusuke couldn't see.
So that was it, then.
Even at this age, Yusuke's instinct to fight wasn't born of a desire to hurt people. It was born of a desire for strength. For advancement. For self-improvement. He fought those who posed a challenge and wanted to fight him.
He had their consent, though maybe it went unspoken. And that's what I'd been hoping to hear. He was developing into the person he was supposed to be, despite anything I might've done. Despite the rules Hiruko claimed I'd broken.
Now, I just had to keep him this way.
Could I afford to break any more rules?
"Why do you always ask questions like that, Keiko?"
I jumped and glanced over my shoulder. Yusuke sat on the edge of my bed with his legs crisscrossed, hands gripping his ankles as he stared at me. Lower lip jutted in a childish pout, but brow knit like an old woman's sewing.
"You're always asking me these really serious things." An accusatory finger pointed in my direction. "You need to lighten up."
"Is that so."
"Yup!" He hopped off the bed, mischievous smile glinting. "Starting tonight, you're going to lighten up. I'm going to make you."
"Really, now."
"Yup. Starting tonight." He drew himself up and smirked. "Keiko, you and are sneaking out!"
Now that was a rule Keiko would never break, no matter how much I thought it sounded like fun. I'd made an art of sneaking out of my previous parents' house. Doing that to the kindly Yukimuras, however…
Yusuke was, of course, oblivious to my inner turmoil. He trotted to my desk and appraised the window above it, peering past the gauzy curtains toward the sloping roof beyond.
"Yeah, this will work!" he said. "We can climb out and shimmy down the drainpipe. It's perfect!"
"Perfectly insane. We'll crack our heads open and die." Yusuke was going to die before his time, but I wouldn't let it be at the hands of anything besides a red sports car and a kid playing in traffic. "You can't seriously think this is a good ide—Yusuke you shut that window right now or so help me—!"
He'd clambered atop my desk, thrown up the sash, and levered a leg out the window in the time it took for me to admonish him. Cool night air blew his hair across his forehead and set my skin to prickling. He had the smile of an imp—oh. Funny. He was smiling like the demon he was destined to become someday. I'd start giggling if I wasn't careful.
"Oh, c'mon, Keiko," he whined. "We're going to get ice cream at the corner store and you're going to stop asking me dumb questions. And I'm not gonna take 'no' for an answer!"
"Too bad. No."
"Keiko-pleeeaaase?"
"No."
"But I'll love you forever!"
"Pretty sure you already love me forever. I've covered for you too many times for you to—"
"Wheeeeee!"
"—get back here you little jerk!"
He'd levered his other leg out the window so he could slide down the shingles to the edge of the roof. I slapped my hands on the window frame and leaned my head out after him. The edge of my desk pressed sharp into my abdomen. Yusuke grinned up at me from the edge, feet swinging over it and into the yawning dark beyond. An exterior floodlight made his hair gleam silver, his eyes gleam gold. He looked more like his future self than ever—Raizen's heir, at least five years too early.
"You just gonna let me go by myself, then?" he called. The asshole faked an uncaring sigh. "Fine. More ice cream for me, I guess. See ya."
"Wait!"
I cursed myself for caving while Yusuke grinned in satisfaction. I told him to wait there and—after taking a moment to think things through—left my room and padded down the hall to the family room. My parents lay on the floor on thin cushions, listening to a radio broadcast (some sort of comedy show; a lot of the jokes went over my head since they hinged on obscure Japanese puns and historical references). Dad fanned himself with a piece of paper; Mom giggled at the announcer's witticisms, hands gently peeling an orange. They both looked up when I came in. Usually I was in bed by now, or getting ready to be.
I took a deep breath before speaking, because what I was about to say was pretty out of character. Oh well. Time to throw my parents for a loop!
"Yusuke wants to sneak out and get ice cream at the corner store," I said. Mom and Dad frowned, but before they could forbid me I kept talking. "I think I should go with him, just to keep him out of trouble. I promise to be careful. Will you pretend to be mad if you catch us coming back? I want it to look real."
My parents blinked—and then they burst into simultaneous laughter. The orange in mother's hands dissolved into a pulpy mess. I smelled burst citrus from the doorway.
"Well, Keiko, if the apocalypse descends and your grades start to slip, it's comforting to know you have a future in comedy," Dad said, chortling and teary-eyed.
"Our little girl," my mother concurred as she slapped her knee. Orange juice stained her pants in dark patches. "Looks ten, acts like a grandmother!"
"I'm just being responsible!" I protested, ready to fight for the right to sort-of-sneak-out—but Oto-san lurched up and pulled me into a hug. I stammered nonsense into his shirt until he let me go.
"We don't mind. It's not that late, and I started sneaking out when I was a lot younger than you," he said. "Go have fun!"
"It's about time you started acting like a kid," Oka-san added. Her mouth puckered. "Sometimes I think I suspect birth to a thirty-year-old."
A twenty-six-year-old, I wanted to tell her, but I didn't. Too awkward.
"Your mother's right. It's time you go be a proper, rule-pushing preteen. So don't you dare ask us for permission for something like this again," said my father. He winked and shoved me out the door. "Now go be ten! And don't tell Yusuke you asked us if you could sneak out! You'll never hear the end of it!"
"We love you, dear!" Mother called as Father shut the door behind me.
"Try to get into trouble, for once!" he added—and then I was alone.
I stood in the hallway, stunned, for what felt like an hour. Then I willed my feet to move, and I shimmied out my bedroom window into the dark next to the troublemaker Yusuke.
Despite my misgiving, it seemed that by his side, breaking the rules, was exactly where I was supposed to be.
NOTES:
There's a fine line, I think, between enjoying fighting the way Yusuke does and being a sadistic bully. Want to establish which side of the line Yusuke calls home. Also wanted to establish that this OC-Keiko is a VERY serious little girl, and everyone notices but her. "Go be ten," indeed.
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