Warnings: LOTS of talk about DEATH AND DYING AND CAR WRECKS. Some violent imagery and gore near the end. Please be careful reading this and skip to next week if you have trouble with this content. This chapter will affect stuff further down the line, but if you're really uncomfortable with talk of violent death, you can skip it for the time being. I'll write a summary of this chapter in the chapter notes for your convenience.
Lucky Child
Chapter 80:
"Know Your Enemy; Know Yourself"
Crumbs clung to Kuwabara's chin as he put his finger to it and asked, "Hey, Yusuke—can I ask you a weird question?"
Yusuke looked up from the cookie he'd been gnawing with one brow arched sky high. "What kind of question?" His brow descended, eyes hooded and dark. "It better not be pervy!"
"What?! No, ew!" Kuwabara shuddered. "I just. It's just?" A long paused; his gaze drifted to the tabletop between us. "Well."
At that point I'd put down my fork, and even Botan had set aside her cup of steaming tea to watch this odd interaction play out. We were at Botan's favorite café, one of the seventeen she'd dragged us to since gaining her Evil Eye and coming to Human World to live—permanently, we assumed, unless something changed about her situation, but we had no real suspicion that it would.
Botan and I sat across from one another. As Kuwabara hesitated, biting his lip and staring into his bubble tea like it might provide him answers instead of Yusuke, she and I exchanged a Look. It was a long Look, and neither of us seemed more or less confused than the other.
This scene at the café had happened long before Botan and I tag-team manipulated Hiei into training her, maybe even before we'd gone to rescue Yukina; I had trouble remembering the exact time, but as I asked Hiei to help me remember death, this is the memory that sat at the back of my mind like a persistently aching tooth.
"Um." Kuwabara shifted nervously in his seat. "So it's something I've been meaning to talk to you about for a long time now, and—"
But Yusuke had no patience for Kuwabara's explanation. He hunched in his seat with a scowl and shoved the rest of his cookie in his mouth, cheeks distending like a chipmunk. "Spit it out," Yusuke said in a spray of crumbs.
Kuwabara's eyes rose to meet his. "What was dying like?"
A moment of silence followed the question, and then Yusuke gave a sharp inhale—one that turned into a hacking cough as he inhaled crumbs of the treat still sitting in his mouth. I pounded him on the back as he guzzled water and tried not to die again, this time via choking.
Botan, meanwhile? She didn't move an inch. Her eyes merely narrowed, cutting over to carefully watch Yusuke as he choked. Sensing another death of his, maybe? Or just gauging his reaction? Either way, Botan's critical gaze did not escape my notice.
"Why the hell would you go and ask me something like that out of the blue?" Yusuke grizzled out once the threat of asphyxiation passed. "Warn me next time, dammit!"
Kuwabara bared his teeth. "Hey, I did try to warn you! And you told me to just spit it out." He crossed his arms when Yusuke grumbled that, oh yeah, that did happen. Kuwabara said, "I've met a lot of ghosts, but none who ever came back from the dead, you know?"
"And did you ask any of those ghosts, huh?" Yusuke said with an accusatory glare. "Or just me?"
"Who do you think I am? Of course I asked them! But none of them had much to say." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "They either avoided the subject or said they didn't remember much. So I thought…"
"Yeah, well." Yusuke hunched over the table like a dejected gargoyle. "You thought wrong, because I don't remember much, either."
Botan finally moved, then, sitting up a little straighter with a frown. "You don't remember anything?" she said with odd hesitance. Usually Botan didn't hesitate to say anything, at least not to Yusuke.
Yusuke nodded. He rested his elbows on the table and hunched over his cookies, encircling the plate with his arms. One of the cookies he took between two fingers, slowly crumbling the edge of it over the plate, confection disintegrating bit by bit. Although I sat next to him, I had trouble reading his expression, proximity offering no help when it came to deciphering the darkness brewing in his eyes like roiling storm clouds.
"I remember leaping into the road to push that kid, and there was a squeal of tires and the world sort of… spun?" He shook his head, eyes momentarily closing. "I think I was spinning and I saw the street and me and the car and the kid flipping like laundry in a spin cycle, but… that's all." Yusuke pushed away from the table with a shrug and wiped his crumbed fingers on his pant leg. "Next thing I knew, I was floating in the sky with Botan. I don't remember leaving my body or anything. Hell, I don't even remember any pain."
"Huh." Kuwabara put his hand on his chin again. "I wonder why you don't remember much else. Because it was a quick death?"
"Beats me. But I saw the coroner's report. They thought I probably died of internal bleeding."
"That doesn't sound fast," I observed under my breath.
"Yeah. Who knows, though?" Yusuke leaned back with a shrug, one arm lying along the back of the booth above my shoulders. "It's not like they went through with an autopsy."
As Kuwabara and I nodded, solemn as we considered Yusuke's words, Botan took a long drink of her tea. As the cup clacked against its accompanying saucer, she grimaced. I'm not sure why.
"To be honest, I'm not surprised to hear this, Yusuke," she said after a time. "Most ghosts don't remember the moment that they died."
Everyone at the table blinked in surprise, and it was Yusuke who found the willpower to say, "Really, Botan?"
"Yes." She sat up a little straighter, voice pitched low beneath the hum of the café's other chatting patrons. "Death is a traumatic experience for most. That moment when a heart stops, but the brain is active for just a moment longer as blood continues to circulate… and then the soul must peel away from its skin and leave the warmth of life behind…"
She trailed off, looking pensive—and perhaps a bit wistful? Kuwabara edged an inch or so away from her in the booth. "That's creepy, Botan!"
Magenta eyes rolled. "Oh, don't be that way. Death is perfectly natural when you get right down to it." She lifted a finger into the air and cleared her throat, clearly preparing herself (and us) for a nice long lecture. "Death is just as much a part of life as life itself. But when a soul has lived in human flesh for its entire existence, suddenly exiting can be quite a shock. Most ghosts I've met report a slight gap in their memory, between the moment they died and the moment their consciousness resolved itself into a ghost." She cupped her hands as if to protect and support a fragile egg, reverence showing clear on her pretty face. "Between those two states you exist as a naked soul, fragile and open to all the energies of the world. Humans who slip peacefully from life at an old age remember the process and that state of in-between, but ghosts who exited quickly or painfully tend to block the moment out."
"And that's what happened to me, huh?" Yusuke said. He forward across the table, frowning but clearly curious. "That gap between dying and meeting you, I can't remember because I was just a soul?"
"Either that, or because your death was traumatic and painful." Botan gave a thoughtful nod. "Both explanations account for your missing memory."
We absorbed this. Soon enough, however, Yusuke declared the entire conversation way too creepy and weird for comfort; he was alive now, he said, and could we please not talk about dying any more than we had to? Thus the conversation moved on, per his request, and we left the talk of death behind.
The subject took quite a lot longer to leave my mind, of course. And over the following weeks, as we rescued Yukina and lived our lives as best as we were able, the memory of that conversation appeared in the forefront of my thoughts with uncommon regularity.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the conversation echoed in the back of my head as I spoke to Hiei in the alley, when I asked him to help me remember what death feels like.
While I quite literally held my breath, Hiei regarded me in utter silence—a quiet broken only by the flap of his coat as it moved on the wings of the wind, not to mention the frantic beat of my heart. Soon enough, however, Hiei's wide eyes narrowed, the red in them almost completed obscured by his lowered lids. "You want me to what?" he said, voice a distinct rumble in his chest.
"Help me remember how it feels to die," I repeated, realizing too late it was probably a rhetorical question.
Hiei took a step toward me. "Meigo, if you're sick—"
He cut himself off, words lingering on the air, but I knew what he was getting at even if he couldn't finish his sentence. I tossed my hair and took a deep breath.
"I will admit I have mild suicidal ideation from time to time," I said with careful precision, "but I have no plans to die or any actual desire for my life to end, Hiei." A shake of my head to clear the cobwebs and get us back on track. "You remember the night we met, right? You burrowed your way into my brain using the Jagan and saw—"
"That you aren't what you seem, yes, I recall," he snapped. "You've made it exceedingly difficult to forget since you keep bringing it up."
I soldiered on as if he hadn't interrupted. "And of course you remember that boy with the pink hair—"
"Stop." Hiei shook his head as I bit my words back. "I have told you more than once that I want no part in whatever it is that makes you so attuned to the machinations of fate. I am not so foolish as to toy with destiny, Meigo. I choose to make my own." He delivered unto me a glare most pointed, nearly sharp enough to cut. "And so should you."
"Hiei, I'm not asking you to toy with destiny," I protested. "I'm asking you to help me remember something I've apparently forgotten—something you managed to uncover that night you rooted around inside my skull."
"And what does remembering death have to do with recovering your lost memories, I ask you?"
"Context. We best remember things through context." At his unmoved expression, one that said he either didn't understand what I meant or just didn't buy what I was trying to sell, I scrambled for an example. "Like—I don't remember the name of the girl who bumped into me on the subway last week, but I remember we had a long conversation about cake shops afterward and that she was wearing a green shirt, not to mention that her favorite band is Megallica." I spread my hands, trying to appeal to Hiei somehow. "Stories provide us with context. Psychology has proven that stories help us remember things. So, to better remember what I've apparently forgotten, I need context. I need story. Remembering death…"
A light sparked behind his livid gaze. "You died right before you met him."
"Yeah." I nodded emphatically. "So maybe if I get close enough to the thing that led me to him…"
Hiei nodded, too, understanding—but then a low growl built inside his chest and his nod turned into a shake. "But that thing is death, Meigo," he said, voice taking on an edge of mockery. "You think nearly dying will unlock something inside you? I guarantee that it will not. This is a terrible idea and frankly, I thought you were smarter than this."
I glared, fists balling at my sides. "I think it's a pretty good idea and that I'm still pretty damn smart, actually." At that I shrugged, trying to diffuse the situation with a bit of humor. "And besides, it's not like I'm asking you to stab me."
"Trust me, if you were asking that, I would have no problems acquiescing," Hiei said.
My jaw hit the floor before slamming back up again with a clatter of incensed teeth. "Hey! Rude!" I warbled.
"If not a stab of this sword, then what?" Hiei pressed. "Poison? Asphyxiation? Push you off a building and catch you at the last second?"
I pretended to look thoughtful. "Hey, that might actually—"
"Meigo. No."
"Gosh, Hiei, I was kidding," I snarked. "Can't you take a joke?"
I rolled my eyes, but when Hiei did not laugh or fire back another quip, I heaved a sigh and composed myself. If I wanted him to help me, I'd need to give him a good reason to do it—really prove this wasn't some lark I hadn't given great thought to over weeks and months of constant scheming.
And trust me. I had thought about this long and hard even after Hiei told me he had no desire to learn more about that boy from my forgotten memories.
"Like I said," I said, voice measured and even, "I don't have a deathwish." I paused. "Well. I mean. Technically I do, but I don't want to actually die, and that makes a difference."
"Get to the point, Meigo," Hiei growled.
"Fine." I drew myself up and said, "I've been thinking a lot about it in the past few days. When I say I want you to help me remember death, I mean that very literally. I want you to go back inside my head and make me remember."
Alarm lit his eyes like candles igniting. "Meigo."
"I want to relive my death," I continued. "I want to relive it over and over again until I remember what happened afterward. That's how you uncovered that memory, after all. You made it replay in my head, out of my control, and then—poof. The new memory happened." Before he could point out the obvious, I held up a hand to stop him in his tracks. "But I don't think just replaying the events in my head by myself will do it. I've done that on my own with no results. No—I need you to guide me, to make me remember the way you did last time, so I can't shy away from the pain of what dying must have felt like. Because that's why I think I can't remember anything." Remember what Botan had said of Yusuke's death, I told him, "Death was too much of a shock, and my brain blocked it out. You can help unblock it."
Hiei didn't say anything. He just stood there, staring at me, enormous eyes unreadable and on fire.
"I've gotten good at lucid dreaming, too," I added when the silence stretched too long and too thick. "I think with your help I can recreate the scene of my death and really get into it, really relive—"
"But why?" Hiei cut in. "Why do you want to do this?"
"Well. Like I said. I want to uncover—"
"I know what you want to do, imbecile," Hiei said. "I'm asking why you want to do it. What motivates you?"
It was a valid question, of course, and Hiei was right to ask it. Lucky for me he waited as I stood in place and fidgeted, trying to get my thoughts straight before giving him an answer. It would not do me well to misspeak in front of him—especially when the stakes were so high.
"That boy with the pink hair put me in this place in history, Hiei," I said when I found the words. "He did it for a reason. I don't know that reason, but I think I need to. He will be at the tournament, apparently. You heard what that demon said." My smile felt thin, and I'm sure it looked that way to Hiei, too. "Isn't it best to know as much about our enemies as we can?"
Hiei's eyes narrowed. "That boy is your enemy?"
I nodded.
"But he called you his friend. He smiled at you in your memory, and you were not afraid of him." His eyes narrowed further. "What makes him your enemy?"
Hiei was full of good questions—and although this was indeed an excellent question, one Kagome and Minato and I had discussed at length, I was not prepared to answer it. My mouth worked around empty air as I struggled for words, hands twisting restlessly together as I battled the nerves building in my chest.
I had begun to think of Hiruko as my enemy a long time before—because what else could he be but an enemy? But how could I make Hiei understand, when he had asked to not to know so much?
"I—I didn't ask to come here," I blurted.
Hiei pulled back, as if I'd struck out at him or something. "What?"
"To be here. To be Keiko. I didn't ask for this." I swallowed the lump in my throat, or tried to. "You saw that I was someone else before I was Keiko. The truth is that he put me here, into her body, and he… he keeps encouraging me to break the rules."
He only scowled. "What does that mean?"
"He wants me to intentionally waylay fate, and at the expense of the people I care about. You, Kurama, Yusuke, Kuwabara, everyone. He wants me to break the rules of destiny for his sake." Breath, when I took one, made my chest shudder. "If he doesn't care about you, about all of you—well." Another smile, this one a little brighter than the last. "That makes him my enemy."
Hiei did not reply. At least, he did not reply right away. He stood there and looked at me for what felt like an hour before slowly walking over to his crate and sitting down. I followed suit, sitting across from him as he reached once more for his ramen.
"I'll think about it," Hiei murmured, face partially obscured by the steam rising from his bowl.
"That's all I can ask," I replied, wondering what expression he read in mine.
We ate our dinners and parted ways, as we always did, but I didn't have the heart to admonish Hiei for stealing a bowl that time. I simply trudged up to my room and fell asleep, exhausted after our verbal battle and hoping, perhaps naively, that Hiei might show up in my dreams to begin the excavation of my memories.
But he did not appear that night.
I waited, but he never came.
The next night, I sat at my desk and did my homework, and at moonrise I looked from my window down into the alley. The radiance of the stars glinted off Botan's blue hair as she and Hiei stood in the alley, talking about who knows what, and soon they turned and walked away, out of sight into night's dark grasp.
He had not appeared to me, but he had kept his word to Botan.
Happy for her thought I was, my heart couldn't help but sink—because now, no doubt about it, everyone was training but me.
Minato's smooth, light voice brushed through the air like a fine-toothed comb. "And he still hasn't given you an answer?" he asked, each word a delicate needle against my skin.
Tracing the edges of my cake with my fork, I shook my head.
Kagome sighed. "I can't believe he's kept you waiting this long. What's the holdup, anyway?"
It was all I could do to shake my head again. Kagome ate a big bite of cake in response, chewing and glaring at the table as if she could make it give her an answer on Hiei's behalf. We hadn't gone for yogurt after aikido lessons (it had finally gotten too cold) and had instead opted for a warm café—coincidentally, one of the seventeen Botan had made me visit with her in months previous. Small world, I guess, or did we simply live in a small town? Well. It wasn't nearly small enough. I hadn't run into Botan but for once since she started training with Hiei, and as for Hiei…
"It's been three weeks since you asked him to help you," Kagome said. She put down her fork with a clatter. "Why is he keeping you waiting this long?"
"I ask him exactly that every time we have one of our meetings, but he always just grunts and doesn't say anything, or tells me he'll answer when he's ready." My voice couldn't help but adopt a certain whining quality. "I hate waiting."
Kagome, sitting next to me in the booth, sighed and leaned her head against my shoulder. "I feel ya there, girlfriend."
"I mean, we still have a ways to go before the Tournament, but it's better to get it done early so we don't rush at the last minute. Why wait, y'know?" I threw up my hands exasperated beyond measure. "And to add insult to injury, every few nights I hear Botan out in the alley and they just head off together to train. He's secretive about that, too. So's Botan. I think she's been avoiding me because I haven't been able to pin her down for a social hour in weeks." With pronounced aggressiveness I stabbed at my plate of cake with my fork. "I just feel useless. This is the one thing I can do to be useful and I've hit this roadblock!"
"Oh, Eeyore," Kagome said. She curled her arm through mine and squeezed. "I'm so sorry."
"As am I," Minato said. He drank coffee, black, and over the rim of his mug he said, "Although I admit that the delay isn't entirely unpleasant, at least for me. I have some reservations about your plan, as I have expressed."
Kagome rolled her eyes. "And expressed, and expressed, and expressed…" she muttered in my ear. At that I had to suppress a giggle. Minato had been as shocked by my plan as Hiei, and while he supported my efforts, he had not been shy about voicing his skepticism regarding my methodology. Like, not shy at all. Sometimes he sounded like a broken record, but in the end it just meant he cared.
He put down his coffee cup. "But regardless of my feelings, I see your reasoning, and I know remembering your death is a necessary evil."
"Thank you for understanding," I said.
He replied with a curt nod and a quoted proverb. "'If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.'" He took another drink of coffee. "I have never even met Hiruko. Neither Kagome nor I have uncovered evidence we are missing memories. It is only logical, therefore, that you should be the one to explore this facet of our existence in this world."
"Plus, neither of us has a handy-dandy-three-eyed-demon to ask for help," Kagome cheerfully observed—and then she sagged against me with a mournful half-wail. "Aw, man, Keiko. You get to have all the fun!"
Minato stared at her. "You think reliving death is fun?"
"Well, it sure beats sitting around on my ass all the live-long day," she replied. "Your canon as Sailor V is underway already and Keiko is going to go to the Dark Tournament in the spring and I'm here for another four goddamn years before anything neat happens!" With another dramatic moan she collapsed in her seat, one arm thrown across her forehead for good measure. "It's just not fair!"
Minato picked up his mug again. "Your taste is absolutely mystifying," he muttered, but his drink could not quite obscure the smile threatening his lips.
"Well, at least you have something to look forward to, Tigger," I said. "In four years you'll get to be a badass warrior priestess with magic arrows. And what'll I be?" I stabbed at my cake some more. "Normal. As usual."
"… oh." Kagome sat up, regret painted across her face. "I'm sorry, Keiko."
"It's OK. It's just hard to watch literally everyone but me get powers or get to train with an extra special sensei." My slice of cake had mostly been destroyed at that point, so I set about mashing the crumbs into a dense, flat patty. "Don't get me wrong. Hideki-sensei is amazing. It's just that from here on out, powers trump muscle, and I'm not getting powers anytime soon."
Minato's eyes narrowed. "'Anytime soon?'" he echoed. "Not never?"
Kagome perked up at his observation, too, hope gleaming in her dark eyes. Smile small and secretive, I explained: "I have at least one option I haven't gotten to explore yet. I'll get to try at the Tournament, but…" I shrugged. "We'll see. I'm not sure he'd want to work with me, anyway."
"Dare I ask who you're talking about?" said Minato.
"It's a secret," I said, putting a playful finger over my lips. "In any case, thanks for letting me rant about this, guys. I appreciate it."
"No sweat!" Kagome chirped. She leaned against my side again, beaming up at me. "What are friends for?"
"Captain." Minato pushed aside his mug and saucer, lacing his hands together atop the table. "If you feel it necessary, I'd be willing to supplement your training with Hideki-sensei with krav maga lessons, as well."
He looked serious, blue eyes unwavering on my face, but I wasn't sure if this was a pity-training offer or what. "Really?" I said, trying not to sound skeptical.
"Yes." He turned to the girl beside me. "And you're welcome to come too, Tigger."
She launched a fist into the air. "All right! I'm so down." She struck at the air, a series of quick one-two punches aimed at an invisible enemy. "Anything that can help me kick demon ass when it finally comes time to head through the well, I'm game for!"
Minato chuckled at her antics—and as he pulled his coffee cup back in front of him, I decided it wasn't a pity-offer, after all. Minato wasn't one for pity, nor was he one to offer something and not mean it. Minato meant what he said and said what he meant, straightforward and honest even to a fault. As Kagome kept punching the air and Minato made a comment about her form, I felt myself smile.
"What would I do without the two of you?" I said.
"Suffer and die, probably," Kagome supplied with a cheery grin, and at that Minato and I both burst out laughing.
We left the café shortly after that, when the proprietors began cleaning tables and stacking the empty chairs atop them. It was still cold, but as February came the weather got a little bit less frigid. We piled on our coats and hats and scarves and set out, carefully picking our way over patches of ice on the sidewalk. Kagome ran ahead and skidded over the ice, cackling with glee as she turned the roads into her own personal skating rink. Minato and I hung back and watched, laughing when she slipped and fell and popped back up again like a particularly exuberant jack-in-the-box.
"You know, Captain." Minato's words came in a puff of airy vapor. "I must admit I admire you."
I looked away from Kagome with a start. "Eh?"
"Your drive to learn. To grow. To help. It's admirable," he said. "Whether it's gaining a power, learning a new martial art, or simply unlocking a memory—you have ambition."
"Yeah, well. That's why the Sorting Hat put me in Slytherin, I guess."
His eyes softened, their color deepening to the color of the night sky overhead as he continued to watch Kagome slip and slide across the frozen ground. "My wife was a religious person. 'God helps those who help themselves,' she'd say, and you have a way of helping yourself she'd find commendable." Finally he looked at me, a smile tugging at his mouth. "I think the two of you could have been friends, in another lifetime."
Minato did not often get sentimental, and I recognized his words for the rarity they represented. Cheeks flushing against the cold air, I ducked my chin and hid most of my face in the coil of my scarf where he could not see.
"Thanks, Minato," I mumbled. "I—I really needed to hear that, I think."
He started to reply, probably to tell me I was welcome, but Kagome's voice rang out through the cold and echoing city streets. "C'mon guys, keep up!" she called, taking a running start at a long patch of ice.
"Perhaps you should slow down," Minato replied, and when Kagome hit the end of the ice patch and tumbled to the ground, he ran forward to help her find her feet again.
I hung back to watch. Minato pulled Kagome up; she grasped his hand tight and pulled him to another strip of frozen concrete. They skated across it together, nearly losing their balance at the end and clinging to each other to keep upright. Kagome cackled with glee while Minato grinned, and when she caught me watching them, she lifted her hand in a wave and shouted, "C'mon in, Eeyore; the ice is fine!"
And despite my reservations, I believed her. I took a running start at some ice with a shout of. "Incoming!"
We had fun that night, turning the world into a skating rink—but as I climbed into bed after all was said and done, it wasn't the happy memories of our cold slid-n-slides that I carried with me into sleep. No. I carried with me words, instead, spoken by Minato's wife back in another lifetime.
"God helps those who help themselves," she'd advised.
Even if I didn't believe in any gods, I knew wisdom when I heard it, and I knew better than to ignore a piece of good advice when it fell into my lap.
In the end, waiting around on Hiei just wasn't my style.
Minato's various proverbs had been the exact kick in the pants I needed to strike out on my own—and not to toot my own horn or anything, but I'd gotten pretty dang good at initiating lucid dreams over the course of the previous months. I'm actually rather proud of myself, no false modesty to be had where my dreams are concerned. I could build whole worlds, fly, reconstruct places from both my old and current lives—you name it, I could basically do it. Dreams are like a gigantic canvases where you can be anything you want to be and create anything you want create.
Well. I could create almost anything, I guess I should say. I will allow myself no false modesty, but I will also not allow myself any false pride, either. It was difficult to make versions of people from my old life or my new one. I could create versions of them that were identical in looks, but there was always something… off, about them. Like the dreaming equivalent of the Uncanny Valley, if you know that term. They might have the same face and same voice as someone you know in real life, but the words they speak don't sound like something they'd say (maybe they were a bit OOC, to use a term from fanfics). Not exactly, anyway. The way they move isn't exactly how they'd move in real life, evidencing slight changes in body language you can't pin down by name but just feel wrong, regardless. And it always got a lot worse when you tried interacting with them, too. Just have them walking around, not really paying attention to you in the dream? Sure. That wasn't so bad. But trying to have a conversation with a dream-doppelgänger (a dream-pelgänger?) was absolutely disturbing, and after my first few failed experiments, I stopped trying to create them altogether.
Lucky for me, though, cars and highways don't have any personality to replicate.
Reconstructing the highway upon which I met my untimely fate wasn't terribly difficult. I'd driven down it a million times, and had even worked for a year in one of the four office buildings that stood in a knot near exit 741. That was right about the place where I'd died, as I recalled, so the night after I met with Minato and Kagome at the café, I set about recreating that specific stretch of highway in the landscape of my dreams.
It wasn't a difficult stretch of road to conjure up, although it was quite large and necessitated manifesting quite a bit of detail. Six lanes of highway on each side of the HOV lanes, plus shoulders, a four-lane feeder road lined with bodegas, noodle shops, that giant furniture store with the funny name, the derelict mall no one ever went to, at least three tattoo parlors, that one Brazilian restaurant and the army surplus store—this area of my home city represented a hodgepodge of cultures and walks of life, and I remembered as much of it as I possible could. I colored the sky a deep shade of orange, stars obscured by the glare of city lights and a haze of thin smog. Even at night my city had smog, inescapable as the air itself. I populated the road beneath the hazy sky with cars zipping north and south, occasional honks and the rush of wheels over pavement adding the texture of sound to my dream's tapestry. I stood on the roof of one of the office buildings by exit 741, the one I had worked at once, as I added billboards and road signs where applicable, stepping back to admire the scene I'd crafted with a low whistle of appreciation. The recreation wasn't perfect, small and unnamable details I couldn't recall nagging at the edges of my mind, but I pushed them aside as best I could.
"OK," I said as I hung the bloated supermoon in the sky and set the iconic downtown skyline against the distant horizon. I turned to the highway below with a grin. "And now for the finishing touch."
From the north, headed south, a red car rushed down the middle of the highway.
It wasn't difficult to remember my old car, a red Nissan I'd named "Rachel" after the character from 90s TV sitcom "Friends." I'd taken some obsessive photos of her back when she first became mine, and I'd seen her model ride past me on the street before. It was not difficult, therefore, to conjure her up and send her speeding down the road. I added a throb of bass, one that issued past her windows and metal plates, because I knew I'd been listening to music as I drove and was killed—but I couldn't recall which song I'd been playing, so I kept the tune a simple bass beat, no singing or melody in evidence. I watched Rachel fly down the highway and over the distant hill of an overpass toward the downtown skyline and out of sight, then hesitantly stripped all other cars off of the highway below. I adjusted the placement of the moon in the sky, to indicate the late hour.
I had been driving down a mostly deserted highway when I died. It had been so late, and I hadn't seen whoever had hit me coming. Still, even if I didn't know exactly how my accident had been triggered, I could replicate getting into one.
"Here's hoping this works," I muttered.
I summoned Rachel to the north again, but before she could go tearing down the road, I froze her in place at the top of an overpass. With a snap of my will I flew through the dream-air, and since this was my dream and my rules applied, I phased through the roof of the car as if it were made of mist and inserted myself into the driver's seat. It had been fifteen years since I last drove a car, but it had to be like riding a bike, right? As in, you never really forget (not the number of wheels, which is of course different)? And this was a dream, after all, so how badly could I fuck this up?
Taking a deep breath (sort of, considering this was all happening in my head; maybe it's best not to dive too deep into the particulars here) I put the car in drive and pressed my foot down on the gas pedal.
Rachel rolled forward down the highway at my command, responding as much to my actions in the dream as she did my unspoken will. The speedometer ticked up and up, the stripes marking the highway lanes steaking past faster and faster through the dark. I wasn't sure precisely where I should get into the accident, but did it really matter exactly where? If I just imagined the crash from my memory and set the car tumbling—
There came a thump from above me, and the car shuddered as if under a great weight.
My dream-heart started to pound; I gave a shriek, the wheel of the car jerking out of my control under my hands, which made me shriek all the louder—because I wasn't in control of this. I wasn't the one making the wheel twist about, the car sway from side to side as I slammed on the brakes and tried to stop, and I most certainly wasn't in control of the horrific metallic screeching coming from above. It wasn't even the same kind of metallic screech I'd heard the night I died, but if it wasn't that, then what the hell was it? I looked up in a panic to see the roof above me buckle, and to my immense horror the top of the car peeled back and was ripped off the lower chassis like the top of an aluminum can.
My screaming stopped.
There, atop the car and silhouetted against the bloated supermoon, stood Hiei.
He hauled me out of the ruined car by the back of my shirt, the seatbelt slipping around me like so much water, and then we were flying through the orange-dark sky to the office building where I used to work and upon which I'd perched to get a good view of my crafted world. Hiei dropped me in a heap on the gravel-covered roof; I sat there, breathing hard, until I found the strength to stagger to my feet and glare at him.
He was glaring at me right back—and not in the oddly muted way of one of my dream constructs, either. He wore a full-on, patented Hiei glare that contained real heat, heat that had me stepping back a pace, dangerously close to the edge of the fifteen-story office building upon which we stood.
This wasn't some subconscious manifestation of Hiei come to stop me from doing something I didn't want to do.
This was Hiei himself—and the minute I'd seen him on top of my car, I'd known him exactly for what he was.
"What were you thinking?" Hiei snarled.
I swallowed. "Hello to you too, Hiei."
"No jokes, dammit. What were you thinking, Meigo?"
"Oh, you know." I twiddled my thumbs. "Just thinking about death and dying and car wrecks, that's all."
Hiei took a step toward me, eyes absolutely ablaze. "You should not have done this on your own. You should not have—"
"—waited around on you for another month?"
Hiei stopped talking when I interrupted. For a minute he stood there with fists clenched, and then he ducked his head with an audible grind of teeth. "It hasn't been a month," he said, but some of the fire in his voice had abated.
"It's almost been a month," I said. "It's been three weeks since I asked and I was done waiting around on you, so I took matters into my own hands."
He just shook his head. "This is insane. Stop this foolishness at once."
"I will not," I countered. It was my turn to advance on him, and to poke him in the chest with the tip of one accusatory finger. "And you can't be around every time I fall asleep to bully me into stopping, either. I'm going to try and uncover my memories one way or another, with you or without you, so if you care about how I might be hurt by this—"
Hiei loosed a growl, but he said nothing.
"—if you care at all, you'll help me." At that I looked at his shoes, chin lowering as my voice dropped, too. "I need help, Hiei. I don't ask for it often." I met his eyes even though it was difficult, pride stinging with every admitted word. "But this time, I'm asking."
Hiei said nothing. We stood there on that imagined rooftop for what felt like an eternity, the hot and humid wind of the swamps of Houston washing across us in a wave of sodden air that barely cooled. Perhaps it was my subconscious mind that made the hem of Hiei's black cloak swirl on that breeze, but it did, undulating the same way it had moved that night I asked him for help in the alley.
"Fine," Hiei grunted.
I did a double-take, startled. "Really?"
"It's not like you left me much choice," he snapped. "Either I don't help and you traumatize yourself, or I help and mitigate the trauma where I can." Another of his growls cut the sticky air. "We'll see how it plays out."
I smiled at him. "Thanks, Hiei."
He just rolled his eyes, though. "Thank me once we've succeeded and you're not a traumatized wreck."
"Fair enough."
He harrumphed, hands jamming into his pockets. "So what's the plan?"
"Um…" I scratched my cheek and gave a nervous laugh. "Well, I don't know precisely how your Jagan works, so…" I waved a hand over the scenery below. "As you can see, I've tried to reconstruct the night I died, which I think is a start, but…"
He looked out over the highway, too, but frowned almost at once, Jagan flaring deep purple behind the bandana on his forehead. "It's not wholly accurate. At least, it's not accurate to what I saw in your memories of that night," he said. "The subconscious retains more than the conscious. And you didn't have a bird's eye view of your own death."
"No. My perspective was in the car." I couldn't keep the hope from my voice when I asked, "Think you could flesh this place out a bit?"
He didn't answer with words. Instead he just looked out over the highway, Jagan once again flaring bright—and everything shifted. It shifted like the moment you realize someone has played a prank on you and moved everything on your desk one inch to the left, and you move it back to its proper place again, only all at once instead of piece by piece. Exits on the highway moved north or south a few feet, and signs grew bigger or smaller, and the subjects of the billboards changed completely. A few of the shops I'd imagined traded places, and more of them sprang into being between the others. A pizza place, an abogado office, cash bonds and a pawn shop and a hair salon, they grew from the ground like plants and bloomed into themselves, fitting into my conscious memories with a subtle click of rightness I can't put into words.
I think I stood there with my mouth open, marveling, for almost a minute. Eventually I shut my mouth, swallowed, and managed to say, "Nice."
Hiei just smirked.
"Now, I think the next step is to just dive in and recall what happened to me that night." I hesitated, looking at him askance. "Can you make me relive it? And if I try to shy away, can you make me keep looking at the memory head on?"
He nodded—but before I could spring into action, he said, "Keiko. You want to recall that boy from your lost memory. What makes you think remembering your death will do that?"
"Like I said the night I asked," I said. "Context—"
"You remember things better with context and story, yes, I know," he interjected with obvious impatience. "But what makes you think reliving your death specifically will unlock memories of that boy? Perhaps that memory was from another forgotten place in your life. You can't know for sure."
He had a point, but he didn't know what I did about death. "It's… it's something Botan said," I told him, picking my words one by one. "There's an in-between state, after a human dies and before they become a ghost. It's a state people forget. It's too traumatic to stick in the mind for long, too naked and raw to be remembered. It's that state I want to remember, and it's in that state I think I met that boy for the first time."
"And you don't think this could harm you?" he said, brows shooting way, way up.
I shrugged. "It might. But I have to try. For the sake of everyone, I have to give it a shot."
Hiei considered this for a moment.
Then he harrumphed, raised his hand, and said, "Don't say I didn't warn you."
And with that, Hiei snapped his fingers.
I was back in the car again as if I had never left it, Rachel's roof intact as I speeded down the highway. Dimly I tried to call out for Hiei, but my mouth refused to move. I tried to look out the window, but my head did not turn from the sight of the road disappearing beneath the hood of my car, pavement like dark water under the hull of a boat, and—
Music.
Music blares from the speakers of my car, bright synthetic pop keeping me awake on the long drive home. Something by Nicki Minaj, fast lyrics pouring off my tongue and keeping my brain engaged with every quick syllable. I sing along and try not to glance at the bouquet of white flowers bound with blue ribbon sitting in the passenger seat.
I'd caught the bouquet at Denise's wedding.
Tom will laugh when I tell him, I think. Tom will laugh and kiss me and say well, of course you caught it. Because we just talked about the future last night, and marriage, and how neither of us wants kids, and how we're perfect together, and how the future looks so bright when viewed side by loving side. The bouquet is too perfect, too perfectly timed to be anything but a sign from fate.
A car with its brights on roars up the highway behind me. I adjust the rearview mirror. My face reflects back at me for just a moment. I see blue eyes, champagne-colored glasses, and loose brown curls falling against my red dress with the long sleeves, cheeks flushed pink from a night of dancing (my face, my face, my old forgotten face, not the face I have anymore but I can't think of that, the thoughts slip away at once). The moon reflects in the mirror, too, full to bursting next to my flushed cheeks. Denise had gotten married on the night of the supermoon, and I'd caught the bouquet she'd thrown.
I think of calling Tom, to tell him.
The impact comes before I can pick up the phone.
My spine undulates; my head snaps atop my neck. Soprano screech of metal on metal drowns out even my blasting music. A quick flash of dashboard illumination, sparks on the pavement lighting up my hands, and the world turns over and over again. I catch the barest glimpse of my terrified face in the rearview mirror again, features pale and glowing like that bloated moon before there comes a crunch and a flash of sharp, hot pain. I look down and see—
With a horrific wrench of willpower I pulled myself away from that memory, hard. A force like a magnet, invisible but undeniable, tried to hold me back and keep me in place, but I struggled against it and refused to look at the scene in the car—and it relented, water slipping between fingers of a lax hand as it released its grip.
Suddenly, I was on the roof again.
Hiei stood at my side. The highway below us stretched from south to north in an endless strip, disappearing into the horizon as the moon floated large and eerie overhead. No cars drove past. Quiet descended like a winter blanket, thick and heavy.
"You pulled away," Hiei said.
"Why'd you let me?" I said.
"I didn't let you." He sounded annoyed, like he'd explained this before or something, though of course he hadn't. "This is your dream. Try though I might to corral you, you are the master of this place. I couldn't keep you in there unless I exerted enough force to hurt you."
I shut my eyes.
Swallowed the nerves in my neck.
Said: "Then try that."
Hiei drew in a sharp breath. "Meigo—"
"I'm not made of glass, Hiei. I won't break. I need to remember past that point." I opened my eyes and smiled, hope and helplessness congealing in my gaze. "Please. Please, just hold me in place a little harder, and little longer the way you did that night in the alley."
It took him a while to reply.
Soon, though, he grunted, "Fine."
And I was back in the car again, stripes on the pavement disappearing under the hood. This time I didn't bother trying to call for Hiei, or glance out the window. Instead I leaned into it, leaned into the sound of the radio—
Music.
Music blares from the speakers of my car, bright synthetic pop keeping me awake on the long drive home. "Super Bass" by Nicki Minaj, fast lyrics pouring off my tongue and keeping my brain engaged with every quick syllable. I sing along and try not to glance at the bouquet of white flowers bound with blue ribbon sitting in the passenger seat.
I'd caught the bouquet at Denise's wedding. It has baby's breath and lots of greenery, a few gardenias standing out stark white against dark green.
Tom will laugh when I tell him, I think. Tom will laugh and kiss me and say well, of course you caught it. Because we just talked about the future last night, and marriage, and how neither of us wants kids, and how we're perfect together, and how the future looks so bright when viewed side by loving side. We'd talking about how since our families were from different states, we should just elope, and we were only half kidding when we said it. The bouquet is too perfect, too perfectly timed to be anything but a sign from fate.
A silver truck with its brights on roars up the highway behind me. I adjust the rearview mirror. My face reflects back at me for just a moment. I see blue eyes, champagne-colored glasses with the scratch on one lens, and loose brown curls falling against my red dress with the long sleeves, cheeks flushed pink from a night of dancing (my face, my face, my old forgotten face, not the face I have anymore but I can't think of that, the thoughts slip away at once). The moon reflects in the mirror, too, full to bursting next to my flushed cheeks. Denise had gotten married on the night of the supermoon, and I'd caught the bouquet she'd thrown.
I think of calling Tom, to tell him.
The impact comes before I can pick up the phone.
My spine undulates; my head snaps atop my neck. Soprano screech of metal on metal drowns out even my blasting music, Nicki's crooned "boom boom boom" sputtering with static as the speakers are damaged on impact. A quick flash of dashboard illumination, sparks on the pavement lighting up my hands, and the world turns over and over again. I catch the barest glimpse of my terrified face in the rearview mirror again, features pale and glowing like that bloated moon before there comes a crunch and a flash of sharp, hot pain in my ankle, bones compacting as something slams into the driver's side door and dents it inward, pinning my left leg in place with what feels like pure fire. The steering column in front of me buckles and breaks and my gut erupts in flames; I scream, but then my breath catches and the scream dies. I look down and see—
I tried to pull away again, to shy instinctively away from the pain and the violence, but the magnetic presence from before bore down like the great weight of the cold ocean and kept me in place, kept me fixed there, and I couldn't move.
—and see the fractured steering column speared through my stomach just below my ribs, spray of blood spattering against the windshield, which abruptly shatters and peppers my face with slicing glass—
I bucked and kicked to get away. The magnetic presence held on tight for one horrifying moment, but my mind snarled a denial and batted it aside, and then I was out of the car and flying whole and undamaged through the sky, back to the roof where Hiei waited with a dire expression on his face. He said nothing as I crouched next to a spinning A/C unit, breath heaving from my lungs, every nerve ending lit up with electricity.
"You," I somehow ground out. "You—you let me go again."
Hiei scoffed. "You didn't exactly want to stay."
"No. But I have to." I rose shakily to my feet. "Again."
But Hiei shook his head. "No, Meigo."
"Please, Hiei," I said. "Please. If I can just stay long enough to—"
He growled, fists balling up as his Jagan flared bright and dark at the same time. "I will do that one more time but I will not try it again!" he said.
And I was back in the car again.
I didn't look around. I didn't think of Hiei. I sank into the memory and let myself live and breathe its every detail, not thinking of what lay ahead, not thinking of what I was about to—
Music.
Music blares from the speakers of my car, bright synthetic pop keeping me awake on the long drive home. "Super Bass" by Nicki Minaj, fast lyrics pouring off my tongue and keeping my brain engaged with every quick syllable. I sing along and try not to glance at the bouquet of white flowers bound with blue ribbon sitting in the passenger seat.
I'd caught the bouquet at Denise's wedding. It has baby's breath and lots of greenery, a few gardenias standing out stark white against dark green. I can smell them, flowers sweet in my nose, I know my mother would make a joke about the baby's breath if she saw it.
Tom will laugh when I tell him, I think. Tom will laugh and kiss me and say well, of course you caught it. Because we just talked about the future last night, and marriage, and how neither of us wants kids (screw you, baby's breath!), and how we're perfect together, and how the future looks so bright when viewed side by loving side. We'd talking about how since our families were from different states, we should just elope, and we were only half kidding when we said it. Why piss off one side of the family when we could piss off both? The bouquet is too perfect, too perfectly timed to be anything but a sign from fate that we should go to Vegas just as we planned and get married by an Elvis Impersonator at the Little White Chapel. It's just hilarious enough to suit us, after all, and—
A silver F-150 with its brights on roars up the highway behind me, spitting smog from its exhaust. I adjust the rearview mirror, bracelets jangling on my wrist. My face reflects back at me for just a moment. I see blue eyes, champagne-colored glasses with the scratch on one lens, and loose brown curls that have fallen out of their style resting against my red dress with the long sleeves, cheeks flushed pink from a night of dancing (my face, my face, my old forgotten face, not the face I have anymore but I can't think of that, the thoughts slip away at once). The moon reflects in the mirror, too, full to bursting next to my flushed cheeks and smeared mascara. Denise had gotten married on the night of the supermoon, and I'd caught the bouquet she'd thrown, and all I could think of was Tom as a few single groomsmen tried to ask me for my number.
I think of calling Tom, to tell him I caught the bouquet.
The impact comes before I can pick up the phone.
My spine undulates; my head snaps atop my neck. Soprano screech of metal on metal drowns out even my blasting music, Nicki's crooned "boom boom boom" sputtering with static as the speakers are damaged on impact. A quick flash of dashboard illumination, sparks on the pavement lighting up my hands, and the world turns over and over again and tries to rattle me to pieces. I catch the barest glimpse of my terrified face in the rearview mirror again, features pale and glowing like that bloated moon before there comes a crunch and a flash of sharp, hot pain in my ankle, bones compacting as something slams into the driver's side door and dents it inward, pinning my left leg in place with what feels like pure fire. The steering column in front of me buckles and breaks and my gut erupts in flames; I scream, but then my breath catches and the scream dies because I've looked down and seen the fractured steering column speared through my stomach just below my ribs, spray of blood spattering against the windshield, which abruptly shatters and sends glass slicing across my cheeks—
Something descends onto the top of my head like the hand of some vengeful deity and dents it inward. I see this happen in the rearview mirror, which has inexplicably stayed affixed to the ceiling of the cabin. The oddity of that strikes me even as I see my head dent and my eyes bulge outward and I feel my jaw slam shut so hard my teeth break and sever my tongue in half like the blade of serrated carving knife. I try to breathe but I choke on broken teeth and my own bubbling, iron-rich blood as my visions darkens, the glow of the supermoon (or maybe it was a street lamp) turning livid red.
The car stops rolling, soon.
I lay there, broken and crumpled and in pain.
I feel my heart go out and my brain burn through the last of my oxygen like a bulb through a final twist of filament.
And then I die.
There is a moment of darkness.
And then, inexplicably, there is light.
All around me, now, is white. Brilliant, unending, ceaseless white, as far as the eye can see. There is no pain. There is only white like snow fallen on a world made of nothing. It hums with hush, with utter quiet, a stage before a riotous performance, forever-white-field stretching around me up and down and north and east and west and south into infinity—and beyond, Buzz Lightyear. The white goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON —
"Meigo," Hiei said. "Who is Buzz Lightyear?"
At the sound of his voice, something inside me jolted and snapped. I screamed and sobbed at once, falling to my knees and clutching my face as I heaved and vomited on the ground. Only the vomit was gone when I opened my eyes, endless whiteness descending unmarred into the pale infinity below. I knelt on nothing I could see, but in my mind's eyes I could not shake the image of my gut stabbed through like Wash from Firefly, shards of teeth spraying from my ruined mouth, my head caved in, stench of blood thick in my nose even now—
A hand touched my shoulder.
Hiei kept his hand there while I cried and screamed and heaved and wretched, for how long I do not know, but I'm sure it would have been much longer if it wasn't for his presence grounding me to that white space. I clutched at his fingers when the crying stopped. He gave my hand a light squeeze.
"Where is this?" I somehow choked out.
"This is the in-between," he said. Both his voice and mine sounded too loud in this quiet place. "This is the in-between place you wanted to find, between life and ghost." He drew his hand away to gesture at the bright abyss around us. "That blow to the head killed you. This is what you remember next. And it goes on forever."
I swallowed down the taste of dream-bile. "Where's Hiruko?"
"Not here." His hands disappeared into his pockets. "Like I said. He wasn't where you thought he was."
I was shaking my head before he even finished speaking. "No. No. That can't be. This can't—this can't be the only thing—"
"It is." His voice, hard as stone, was somehow not cruel when he told me, "Give it up, Meigo. Give up this quest of yours."
"No." I shook my head and shot to my feet, even though the motion made me stagger. "No, Hiei, no! I refuse to believe this is it! Not after I went through all of—"
I stopped talking.
Hiei stared.
I stared back.
I began to run.
I ran and I ran, dream legs incapable of getting tired if I didn't wish to feel my muscles burn. I ran for about a minute, frantic with arms flailing—but before even a minute past, Hiei reappeared as if I'd simply run around a circular track. I skidded to a stop and chose another direction and ran that way just as fast, but like before, I found myself beside Hiei once again. Loosing a scream of frustration to the white sky, I didn't stop. I just ran past him and kept running, until he reappeared, and I ran some more, past his frowning visage so fast I barely saw it—
"Meigo," he said. "Stop."
"No, Hiei," I threw over my shoulder. "I have to figure out—"
He disappeared behind me into distant whiteness, but then he was ahead of me again just as quickly, appearing from the depths so abruptly it hurt my eyes. He was too solid, coated head to toe in black, anathema to the white that hurt my eyes in a different way. I wasn't sure which hurt worse, but I suspected the latter even when Hiei grabbed my arm and dragged me to a halt.
"Meigo, stop!" he said.
I wrenched my arm from him. "What do you want?"
"This place—it should be as endless as your dreams, as depthless as your mind itself," he said with a wild wave. "And yet you run, and are back next to me in a heartbeat."
He blurred from sight, reappearing beside me in a flash of black that burned my retinas.
"This place isn't infinite," Hiei said, spinning on his heel to look around us. "It's much smaller than that."
My heart stuttered, and not because of my mad sprinting. "How?"
"Someone has—someone has taken your memory and repeated it, looped it," he said, and he bared his teeth. "Stitched it together at the corners in a circle. It keeps you here, trapped in this moment, so you can't move on." With a look of dawning realization, he met my eyes. "You have more memories past this, Meigo. You just can't reach them."
It was both a triumph and a defeat, hearing that from Hiei's mouth. I had been right: There was more to discover. But I had been foiled in my attempt, because this unnatural memory of mine barred my way to the truth.
But after everything I'd been through, I'd be damned if I let what was most likely Hiruko's interference stand between me and revelation.
My hands tightened into hard fists, like hammers made of skin. "Have you ever been in a hall of mirrors?"
Hiei frowned. "No."
"Mirrors are tricky. They can make it look like you stand in an infinite space, when really you're in a tiny room." I raised my hand high above my head. "But there's one thing a mirror illusion can't stand up to."
"And what is that?" Hiei asked.
"A sledgehammer."
Like a magical girl summoning her magical weapon of choice, the sledgehammer appeared in my hand in a burst of brilliant magenta light (because this was my dream, dammit, it was my fucking head and no one could stand between me and what was mine). I twirled it in my grasp with a flourish and spun, hurling the sledgehammer up and away like an Olympian flinging shotput. Hiei let out a hard bark of a laugh as it sailed, saying that would teach whoever did this to my mind who they answered to—and the sledgehammer hit something shortly after, colliding with the white that was not, in fact, as endless as it had first appeared. My dreamed-up sledgehammer froze in space, a huge network of black cracks blooming like a mirror hit by a hard brick. The cracks spread outward, racing away from the hammer as if trying to see who was fastest, snaking over the walls and then hitting a corner, changing angles and racing until it hit another corner, the cracks forming the shape of a huge square room around Hiei and I, cracks circling it and then converging behind us in a black web—
And then the white fell away, shards of the mirrored white room falling to pieces on the floor. Hiei and I stared in silence at what lay behind the white, neither of us able to speak as bit by bit the truth was revealed.
"What in the hell is this?" Hiei said eventually.
"I—I don't know," I replied.
Behind the mirrored white lay red. Thousands, no, millions of pulsing red thread the color of my spilled blood covered the walls, a web so thick I could not see through it, pulsing and undulating and keeping whatever lay beyond them from view. The air in the room turned the color of those threads the moment they appeared between bits of white, their movement like the sound of moth wings on the air, and as we watched them tangle and twist together, sometimes small gaps appeared between them.
I walked closer. Stared at the red threads from only an inch away, until a gap appeared.
Behind it gleamed black stone, hard and impenetrable as night.
I lifted my hand and reached for it.
"Don't," Hiei said in the voice of a dagger. "We will work on passing this another night."
My hand dropped.
Hiei was right. We'd try again some other time.
For now, I was far too tired—both mentally and emotionally—to continue past this point.
My jaw cracked as an enormous yawn climbed up my throat. Kaito set aside his half-eaten lunch and remarked, "You look terrible."
I yawned again, elbow on my knee, chin pillowed on my hand. "Shut up," I grumbled as I closed my bleary eyes, but it was no use.
"Bags under the eyes," Kaito continued, "sallow skin, limp hair—"
I cracked one eye and glared. "Way to make a girl feel pretty."
"It's a gift." His brows knit together above his glimmering glasses. "But in all seriousness, have you slept?"
Truthfully, the answer was "sort of." It had been a week since my first rendezvous with Hiei, and even though we'd been making attempts all week, we hadn't made a lick of progress unraveling the thicket of red threads blocking my memories—let alone breaking through the barrier of solid black stone beyond them. Even though I was asleep through the each night's ordeal, I always woke up feeling like I'd slept no more than an hour. We'd have to back off the attempts, or at least stagger them out a bit, if I wanted to not keel over dead from exhaustion.
And that's not even considering that thanks to my lack of proper rest, I wasn't on top of my mental game. I probably could've at least come up with a few more explanations for the red threads and black rock if I was running on a full tank of sleep. As it stood, my weary mind could only theorize that the red threads were a metaphysical block the red-wearing, thread-weaving Hiruko had woven around whatever truths he wanted to conceal from me. The black rock, though? I had very few explanations for that, meanwhile, and after a week of wondering, I had one single lead to go on.
The last time I had seen a smooth black stone, it had lain in the middle of a puddle of blood coughed up by a certain Fate.
Which made me think that even if I did manage to break through Hiruko's red tapestry and see what lay beyond the black rock—well. If I spoke of the truths I found there, would I cough up a fountain of blood and a smooth river stone like Cleo?
It was no use trying to use logic when my brain was too fuzzy to even come up with a snark-back to the prying Kaito. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and whined, wordless in my exhaustion. Kaito sighed.
"And you," he said, volume of his voice changing as he shifted his attention to Kurama. "You haven't heard a word I've said. Normally you're first to notice whenever Yukimura looks unwell."
I looked up in time to see Kurama—who had been staring into space as he lounged on the stairwell's steps—look at Kaito with a start and a small, contrite smile. "Apologies; my mind drifted," he said. "You were saying?"
"So I was right," Kaito said, not bothering to hide his displeasure. "You are distracted."
Kurama adopted a puzzled expression I knew damn well as an act. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean," he said, eyes wide and innocent.
Kaito and I both snorted. Kaito didn't know about Kurama's constant training in the woods outside of town, but he was no idiot. Kurama was indeed distracted—something I was rather grateful for as I battled my sleepless nights. Having Kurama pry into my business would likely end in disaster, or at least the end of my foray into my blocked memories.
"Likely story," Kaito said when Kurama's innocent look persisted. He crossed his arms over his chest and glanced between me and Kurama in turn. "Well, spit it out, the both of you. What secrets are you keeping this time?"
Kurama and I spoke in unison: "I'm not keeping secrets, Kaito."
We looked at each other in shock. Kaito's fingers drummed against his arm, eyes narrowing in disgruntlement.
"Uh-huh," he said. "How very believable."
"Sorry, Kaito," I said. "I'm just exhausted. I'm taking dance lessons this semester and they've got me beat." A completed true statement, even if it wasn't the whole truth. "Plus with all this German homework, I'm just not getting enough rest."
Kaito harrumphed, but gave no indication he believed me. To Kurama he said, "And what's your excuse, Minamino?"
"I have none, I'm afraid," Kurama replied with another of beatific smiles. "Simply that I'm occupied by schoolwork, as is the regrettable fate of most high schoolers."
If Kaito hadn't believed my lie, he most certainly didn't believe Kurama's. His glasses slipped straight down his nose so he could glare at Kurama over the top of them unimpeded. "Oh, please. School comes as easily to you as breathing." He tuned the glare my way. "And you. You mean to tell me German homework has you up at night to the point of looking like some dreaded revenant from a horror story?"
My cheeks colored; I tucked my hair behind my ears, hands slapping back down against my thighs as I tried not to look too guilty. "Well. I—"
"Keiko?"
I stopped talking, my head (along with Kaito and Kurama's) swinging toward the sound of my name. Peering hesitantly up at us from the bottom of the next flight, one hand perched on the railing, was Amagi. She dipped a shy bow at Kurama, which he awkwardly returned from a sitting position, then she gave Kaito a nod, too, before looking at me. I waved; she waved back, eyes flickering once again to Kurama as she cleared her throat.
"I'm sorry to bother you during your lunch period," she said, "but I have a favor to ask."
"Oh, sure thing." I stood up and trotted down the stairs to stand beside her. "What's up?"
Her voice sank low, trying to be subtle. "Are you free Sunday?"
"Uh, yeah. I am. What's up?"
"I was wondering if you have any plans, and if not, would you be willing to accompany me on an outing?"
"Uh. Yeah, sure, I'm down." I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. "Do you want to invite—?"
She shook her head. "I was hoping it could be just the two of us, if you don't mind."
My spine stiffened at Amagi's whispered words, and I was unable to keep a blush from heating my ears beneath the short fringe of my hair. Somehow I thought maybe she'd want to invite Kurama since at one she'd had a crush on him, but—wait. If she wasn't asking Kurama, and she was asking me—?
Oh.
Oh boy, this was potentially a very awkward situation about to happen, I should probably cut this off at the pass and just say no, I can't—but I'd already said I'd had no plans, dammit! Ugh!
"Oh. Oh? Oh." I fidgeted in place and stared very hard at my shoes. "Um. Yes? Sure. Yes. That's fine."
"Good." I heard the smile in her voice even though I didn't dare look at her to see that expression cross her pretty face. "I'll stop by your place to pick you up. Is noon all right?"
"Uh." I looked at the ceiling. "Sure thing."
"Good. I look forward to seeing you." She moved, probably bowing at the boys behind me since she said, "Kaito. Minamino. I hope you're both well."
"We're fine," was Kaito's curt reply, and with another bow at me (one I only barely managed to return), Amagi turned and descended the stairs.
Eventually, far below us on the ground floor, a door shut. I only moved when its peal echoed up the stairs, turning back to Kurama and Kaito with a cool smile—one I hoped to hell didn't betray the fact that my pulse still thudded in my ears like a freight train.
Apparently my poker face betrayed me, though, because both Kurama and Kaito stared at me with brows lifted threateningly close to their hairlines. I coughed into my fist, ignored them both, retook my seat on the window sill and tucked dutifully into my lunch.
"So," I said. "Where were we?"
"You tell me," Kurama murmured.
"Indeed," Kaito concurred.
But I just shrugged, and didn't look at either of them—because I had no idea what Amagi wanted to do on Sunday, truth be told, and this was another bit of my personal business I wasn't keen on my friends interrogating me about.
NOTES:
What's Amagi want? Find out next time!
We're in "Grand Tour/Reunion" mode as the Dark Tournament approaches. Need to check in with the secondary and tertiary characters before leaving them behind and focusing on the main cast. Kaito, Amagi, Ayame, Hideki, the other switch characters, etc. Basically just tying up loose ends before we lose the chance to address them and get stuck on an isolated island for STARS KNOW how many chapters.
Any predictions as to how long this fic will be in terms of chapters? Taking bets now!
I'm guessing we have two chapters (three if things veer off track) before we make it to the Tournament.
Next time on Lucky Child: "Amagi reveals to Keiko a glimpse of the future to come. A certain friend pays Keiko a visit. Keiko receives a badly timed phone call."
CHAPTER SUMMARY, AS PROMISED IN MY STARTING NOTE: Keiko asks Hiei to help her remember details of her death so she can unlock more memories of Hiruko, who appears to have messed with her memories after her death in her past life. Keiko meets with Minato and Kagome for support. At Minato's unwitting encouragement, Keiko tries to relive her death on her own, but Hiei intervenes to keep her out of trouble. With his reluctant help she relives her gory final moments and manages to see what happened afterward—sort of. Her memories appear to have been blocked off by some unnatural force, and Keiko has no idea what lies behind the barrier placed inside her head. It is clear, however, that her memories have been tampered with.
I was so grateful to everyone who reviewed last week. It was a tough week for me, and you made it better. Still figuring some stuff out but I'm feeling much better. Thank you so much to the following: Domitia Ivory, Trinity aellos, Sweetfoxgirl13, LadyEllesmere, tammywammy9, Kaiya Azure, Life Dealer, DiCuoreAlissa, gooseberry-pie, Sterling Bee, xenocanaan, Viviene001, Kasai Keira, The Adorable Muffin, read a rainbow, Marian, MissIdeophobia, EdenMae, shen0, 431101134, FangirlNikora, C S Stars, Metro Neko, Yakiitori, tatewaki2000, Turtle Kid the Woolgatherer, Saria 19, Raylita, Blaze1662001, SlytherclawQueen, rya-fire1, masqvia, StrawberryHuggles, The Story Teller Sentinel, WaYaADisi1, Zynis, Serendipity's Tears, Speckled One, Konohamaya Uzumaki, yofa, Shadowed Replica, Ignis76, general zargon, Anime Pleasegood, Tay, FlightOrFight, kittenfood, Guest Starring As, and five guests!
