Warnings: None
Lucky Child
Chapter 103:
"The Dark Tournament Finals, Round 2"
The tree cast shadows like the ghostly fingerprints across my skin. Wispy and cool, smelling of distant rain and fresh sunshine, the dappled shade undulated and pulsed nearly in time to the music buzzing in my left ear. In my right ear, the screams of the demonic crowd inside the stadium thrummed like a colony of unseen, angry bees. I ignored them. Sitting with legs crossed, elbow on knee, head resting on my hand, I was too absorbed in the sounds issuing from the headphone I'd snaked up my sleeve to pay them any real mind.
It felt shameful, in a way, to listen to my music with such secrecy. I hadn't done the headphone-concealed-in-sweatshirt-sleeve trick since high school study hall in my old life, but here I was sneaking a hit of My Chemical Romance when no one was looking. I hadn't been able to resist. If anything could comfort me now, it was "Welcome to the Black Parade."
Minato would be furious…
After our moment in the hallway, I'd dropped Kurama off at the locker room without a word. Our friends stared at us like we had declared that we'd just robbed the national treasury but hadn't taken a cent: disbelief, shock, horror, more disbelief, all cycling through each other in a loop. Botan and Yukina soon recovered enough to swarm him to administer more healing—and as soon as people stopped paying attention, I'd booked it out and headed for the door to the outside. Tobi (still lingering there with the cars) gave me a look of worry as I passed, but he said nothing as I installed myself underneath a tree and pulled out the iPod in its camouflage cassette player, threaded the headphones through my sleeve, and commenced with listening. Music quickly calmed me down, but it was cold comfort nonetheless.
I wouldn't be able to hide out here forever.
Right on cue, a voice said, "If you're going to have a nervous breakdown, at least try to spare us that agony until after we've won."
My head jerked off my hand, but it was only Hiei. He stood before me with head held high, hands in his pockets, feet spread confidently beneath him upon the grass. I tucked my headphone deeper into my sleeve as we traded a long, lean stare. Hiei wasn't quite glaring, but he wasn't not quite glaring, either.
When he didn't say anything else, I sighed, head falling forward as I dragged a hand through my hair. "Sorry," I muttered, cupping the back of my neck. "I didn't mean to be distracting."
"No," he said at once. "But that's just who you are, Meigo. I shouldn't expect any differently at this point."
I really glared, then. "If you're going to call me a drama queen, just get it over with already."
Hiei harrumphed, but he didn't say anything else. He pivoted on his heel and stalked off, back toward the guarded door near the locker room. The action irked me more than it should. He'd basically come outside just to through an insult and tell me not to wreck his match the way I'd wrecked his matches in the past, and while it was just like Hiei to cut right to the damn point, it was still annoying.
But to my surprise, Hiei stopped walking. He didn't turn around, standing with his back to me just outside the circle of shade cast by the tree above my head.
"If you're feeling ill," he said, voice hardly louder than the roar of the distant demons, "I'd suggest staying out here for the duration of the next match."
"Huh?"
"Because the next one is mine." His head turned; he smirked, lip curling beneath his vivid scarlet eye. "And I guarantee that whatever disgust you felt at watching Kurama's display will multiply a hundredfold when I'm finished with my opponent."
"Um. OK." My brow furrowed. "But why are you telling me this?"
"I want to avoid having to clean your vomit off my shoes, Meigo," Hiei curtly intoned. "Why else?"
He didn't wait for me to reply, question clearly intended as rhetorical—but as he walked away and vanished inside the stadium, I had to wonder if that was really it. Was he just plain tired of my theatrics and wary of gross human drama queen vomit, or was he trying to keep me from another breakdown for my sake? Tough to say. Something made me suspect the former. But what Hiei didn't know was that there were other reasons I didn't want to go back into the stadium. Reasons far more pressing than the beating he intended to give to Bui, or even my desire to avoid another breakdown. Not that he'd stuck around to ask.
Alone again, I leaned my head on my hand and shut my eyes.
Much though I wanted to see canon play out—it was time to wait.
"So tell me again why you want to wait for the match to end from out here?" Botan asked, good-natured incredulity ringing in every syllable.
Yukina looked curious, as well, though she hid her expression behind the cup of water she'd been sipping from. Botan, Yukina and I sat upon the blanket I'd brought with us, sharing some of the snacks I'd jammed into my backpack. They'd come to check on me not long after Hiei left. The rest of the group, they said, went to watch Hiei's match. It was an interesting division of personality types, I mused, considering who worried the most about their friends and who prioritized the fights—not that it mattered to me either way. I was just glad to eat something, which helped settle my nerves.
"Oh," I said with a shrug as I reached for a container of grapes. "No reason, really."
Yukina smiled. "To be honest, I'm almost glad." But then her face fell. "Seeing Kurama-san so brutalized was…"
"Oh, Yukina, I'm so sorry." Botan reached of her, gripping the ice apparition's shoulder and giving her an expression of utter sympathy. "That must have been quite a shock."
"No." Yukina shook her head. "The reputation of this tournament is well known. But I have grown to become friends with all of you, if you don't mind me saying so. Seeing a friend in that condition…" She hesitated, but soon she added: "I can understand why Keiko reacted the way she did."
I couldn't help but laugh. "Well, I'm glad I didn't seem like a complete psycho."
"I suppose that answers my question," Botan muttered, looking at me askance. "Given how cut-throat Hiei can—urp."
Botan froze shortly after her hand flew to her mouth. Her magenta eyes held panic in their pupils, worry and fear in their irises and sclera. She tried not to shoot a furtive glance at Yukina, but she mostly failed in that regard. If Yukina didn't already suspect Hiei was her brother, then that reaction probably didn't help the preservation of secrecy much at all.
But Botan recovered as best she was able, soldiering on with panicked cheer. "What I mean is that we know next to nothing about this Bui character, so of course Keiko doesn't want to watch Hiei fight him!" Botan said, nervous laughter pouring from her lips. "If there's any chance of more bloodshed like we just witnessed, I don't blame you one bit for sitting this round out. Perfectly reasonable, says I!"
I swallowed the grape I'd been chewing, rolling another one back and forth between my fingertips. "That's… not the only reason," I said.
Yukina's head cocked to one side, strands of wintergreen hair falling softly across her cheek. "Oh?"
"What do you mean?" said Botan.
"Let's just say that out of all the power-ups that have happened in the past day or two, Hiei's is the most… dramatic."
As if summoned, something rumbled. Deep in the earth, reverberating through the air, the bottomless pulse seemed to buzz in my teeth like some cosmic electric drill. Botan and Yukina clearly felt it too, if the shock on their faces was anything to go by—and the shock deepened into horror as the sun above turned dim, clouds rolling and rushing too swiftly across the sky. Lightning cracked, platinum bolts striking down from the heavens in flashes of neon lilac and flame-heart blue. If we hadn't been sitting on our blanket, it surely would've been blown away by the force of the acrid and scorching wind that stripped past, turning Botan's powder blue hair the color of a drowned face in the odd and alarming midday twilight—and then there came the crash. A great booming crash that echoed through the earth, vibrating the ground beneath us with the force of shifting tectonic plates. Botan cried out and pointed upward into the air above the stadium, and when I turned to look, I beheld a column of dust rising from the structure like a swarm of locusts.
And then there was the Dragon.
I had seen the Dragon of the Darkness Flame before, just once, back in Hiei's botched match against Zeru. It had been an impressive sight, awe-inspiring and fear-inducing in equal, terrifying measure. This Dragon, however, put that former beast to absolute shame in both scope and size, power obvious even from a distance. It launched upward like an arrow fired from an enormous bow, pitch blame and glittering with crackles of dark blue and purple energy as it pierced the sky, flying heavenward with a roar that sounded like a million enraged screams all crying out at once. Yukina clapped her hands over her ears while Botan stared slack-jawed at its undulating form—and when it turned back upon the stadium, all three of us scrambled up and backward, sheltering with each other beneath the tree as it headed for the stadium again at full tilt. Another rumble and an even louder crash cut the air as it appeared to collide with the stadium, vanishing from view as it apparently returned to its master on the stadium's opposite side. Another cloud of dust rose from the building at that point, staining the purple sky with specks of destruction.
"How much of the stadium do ya reckon that destroyed?" I asked when the sky began to lighten back to blue, first navy and then royal, and finally to the pale of normalcy. "A quarter? A third? Maybe even half…"
"My word!" was all Botan could say.
Yukina tugged on my sleeve. "Is that…?"
"The Black Dragon," I told her. "Hiei's power."
"It's enormous!" said Botan, eyes still locked on the sky and the dust rising dark against it. "He managed to conjure it in the fight against Zeru, but to master it like this…. To unlock this much of its power…" Her eyes widened, a smile threatening her mouth. "After all the work he put into it, he must be just—"
"Had he been working on this for a while?" I asked.
"Since before I began training with him. I watched him make some initial attempts to summon the beast. But this…" She shook her head, as if struggling to understand what she had just seen. "That is so much more than the fight against Zeru."
"Do you suppose he won?" Yukina asked, voice hushed and tentative.
"With a blast that size, it's difficult to imagine that he didn't." Botan hopped from foot to foot, and then a grin truly broke across her features. She leapt in place, fists flying skyward. "Way to go, Hiei! You show 'em who's boss!"
Yukina waited for her to come back to earth and calm down before asking another question. "Botan," she said in that same, tentative tone of voice. "I realize this is not an opportune time, but may I ask you a few questions regarding Hiei's powers?"
"Oh?" Botan blinked at her, then smiled. "Well, I suppose that's fine."
Yukina nodded, matter-of-fact. "Hiei wields the Darkness Flame. I understand that is through the use of his Jagan Eye."
"That's right," Botan said.
"But he also has used mundane fire in combat." Fiery eyes so at odds with Yukina's cool demeanor searched Botan's face. "Is that accurate?"
"Yes, it is," Botan said, nodding like a bobblehead. "It's much easier to manipulate, especially in Human World—something Hiei had to experiment with for quite some time to find out."
Yukina considered this a moment. "Does that mean that Hiei is a fire apparition? He clearly has a natural affinity for flame."
Botan froze. "Oh. Well. Um." Her smile took on a slightly manic quality. "You'd have to ask him! I don't actually know much about Hiei's background, you see, and—"
"Don't you train with him?" Yukina said, voice a touch harder than before—and then her cheeks colored, hands flying to her mouth. "Oh! I apologize if I'm being presumptuous. I just thought…"
"It's fine, Yukina, really!" Botan said, doing her best to look breezy (though she undoubtedly didn't feel that way). "It's just… Hiei isn't the type to talk about himself. Or about anything, really." Her lips pressed together. "Unless it's about not following through when I swing a weapon, of course. If it's about that, I can't get him to stop talking."
"… I see."
Yukina fell quiet after that. Although she tried to hide her disappointment, the tense set to her eyes and lips gave the game away. I'd been glad she'd chosen to grill Botan instead of me about Hiei, considering the magnitude of the secret he demanded we all keep for him, but I still found myself stepping into the conversation at the sight of her bowed head. Curse me and my weakness for puppy eyes…
"Say, Yukina," I said. "What's got you so curious about Hiei and his powers?"
Her smile returned, if only a little bit. "Hiei is something of an enigma. Out of everyone I've met, he's the one I know the least about." Here she looked curiously at Botan. "Including why the two of you began training together. Yusuke has suggested it's quite the story, but…"
"It is." Botan looked away. "I just pray you never have to see why firsthand."
I wasn't accustomed to seeing Botan look quite so morose, so the tense cast to her expression struck me momentarily mute. Before I could ask what was eating her, however, a dull roar rose into the air—an angry roar, hundreds of voices all crying out with the same single-minded fury. But that could only mean one thing: Hiei had won, pissing off everyone rooting for Toguro (which basically meant everyone). Botan grinned at the sound, stretching her arms over her head with a groan of satisfaction.
"Well. That's our cue, if I've ever heard one!" she said. "What's say we head back in and survey the damage, girls?"
"Yes." Yukina nodded. "I would like to see how Hiei fared, myself."
Botan giggled, swiping the picnic blanket and food pack off the ground with a flourish. "And with that, we're off!" She pressed a hand between my shoulder blades, nudging me forward. "Lead the way, Keiko!"
"Oh. Uh, sure."
Inside, the first clue that something catastrophic had happened was the dust on the floor. A light hung from its socket in the ceiling from a single wire, gently swaying on the still air. The hallway leading past the locker rooms and to the general stadium was partially blocked by a demon who looked quite unconscious, trapped as he was beneath a long fluorescent light, metal casing and all, that had tumbled from its mooring and onto his unsuspecting shoulders. A few demons had gathered around him, quietly muttering about what to do. A large pushcart of water bottles lay upended and scattered throughout the hall, clearly having gone out of control when the light fell and struck its tender. We picked our way over the dust and past the fallen demon with care, heading for the secret door behind the concessions stand outside, and from there we headed for the stands—but even before we reached them, it was obvious something had changed. Bright light filtered into the part of the stadium underneath the upper levels, the concessions stand bathed in much more potent illumination that before.
But that was understandable consider Hiei had destroyed, at minimum, an entire third of the stadium.
The destruction began only a few sections away from where we'd originally been sitting with Shizuru and Atsuko. The walls and roof of the stadium were gone, edges ragged and full of precariously balanced chunks of stone and rebar. It was through there the sunlight poured, dust motes drifting like fireflies on the sunshine, and as we stood at the top of our seating section to marvel at the chaos, I had to shield my eyes from the sun. The ring in the stadium's center was in pieces, too. Not too far away from the wreckage of the ring, I spotted a group of figures I recognized. Gesturing to Yukina and Botan, I led the way down our section's stairs, mindful of the chunks of stone that had somehow landed upon them. A few demons in the section nursed wounds to their heads and shoulders; clearly I'd been right to not wait inside, because we surely would've suffered at least a little damage thanks to Hiei's vicious dragon.
And Koto agreed, apparently. She stuck her head out of her announcer's box when we neared. She wore a headset, and when she spoke, she curled her hand around the mic to muffle her voice.
"You were right, it turns out," she said. "They can hold their own, and I love it!" She shot the demons in the crowd behind us a look of savage joy. "Even if some of the fans are a little miffed that their odds-on favorite isn't in the lead already, of course, not to mention that Hiei sent half of them to the coroner."
I grinned. "Well, we aim to please."
She grinned back, but before we could really start talking, her grin faded. She pressed her hand to her headset and barked something into her mic, turning her back on us. She had work to do, it seemed, so we left her behind and jumped over the partition and onto the stadium floor. I kept a close eye on everyone who came close as we trekked over to our friends, but I didn't spot any signs of Team Toguro. Even Bui was missing, which made me a little sad. Would've been cool to see an underrated canon character in the flesh, but it wasn't a big deal. I had much, much bigger fish to fry just then.
As we came upon the rest of our group, I heard Atsuko give a loud moan. "Oh, man," she was saying as she stared forlornly at the busted ring. "A delay, and I'm all out of liquor."
Shizuru rolled her eyes. "Told ya to pace yourself."
"Geez, Mom," said Yusuke. "How much did you even drink?"
"Not enough. Not nearly enough!"
"Wait—you had a lion's share of alcohol left when we left earlier," Botan said. "Atsuko, did you really drink it all?"
Our friends turned to us, then, with various waves and hands lifted in greeting. Kuwabara scurried forward with a grin on his face. "Oh, hey Keiko! And Botan, and Yukina," he said. "Glad to see you back!"
Ignoring him, Atsuko gave another moan and informed Botan, "When Hiei got serious, demons panicked and ran away, and my stash got trampled!"
I grimaced. "Shit. Talk about a party foul."
Kuwabara blinked at me in confusion. "A what?"
Even Kurama looked confused. "I speak English, and even I'm not sure what that means."
"It's just an expression," I was quick to tell them, and I was even quicker to change the subject away from my unintended use of English slang. Trying not to look as nauseated as I felt, I said, "So, uh. At the risk of me having another breakdown, how'd that fight go?"
"Hiei won." Yusuke's head dipped, lips thinning into an inscrutable line. "But…"
My heart leapt into my throat. "But?"
"Well…"
He hesitated a moment longer, not meeting my eyes—but then his mouth twisted, one eyebrow rising, and the sound of a tire leaking air hissed from his nose. He couldn't keep a straight face for another minute, and soon even Kuwabara was chortling under his breath. They got their acts together when I glared daggers, telling them with my eyes to quit fucking around, and soon they jerked thumbs over shoulders toward something just behind them. I trotted forward, desperately casting about for—
I stopped short when I spotted him, and soon I was laughing, too.
Hiei lay on his back beside the broken ring, head pillowed on a slab of crumbling concrete. His eyes were closed, breathing slow and long and even—dead asleep from the looks of it. And in sleep his face had lost all of its serious creases, all tension and negativity vanished in favor of a shocking innocence that looked both natural and completely out of place on him. Not even Kurama was immune to the comedic effect of seeing Hiei in this vulnerable state, because when he caught my eye, even he couldn't resist a chuckle.
"Exhausted from his efforts, I'm afraid," he said, lips twitching at the corners. "But he won, and decisively at that."
"I'll say the little bastard won!" Yusuke crowed. "Blew the roof clean off this place in the process, too."
Kuwabara gave another chortle. "I'm just trying to keep myself from drawing a mustache on him, personally."
"Same." I put a hand over my heart, faking solemnity. "Just try to stay strong, Kuwabara. Don't want him using that dragon on us when he wakes up."
"I kinda think it might be worth it," he said, edging closer to Hiei. "Just one little mustache?"
"Maybe a monocle?" I said, unable to keep from playing along.
"And a pair of crazy eyebrows and a snaggletooth?" said Kuwabara.
"What happened to staying on Hiei's good side?" said Botan.
We ignored her. "All right, that settles it!" said Kuwabara.
"Who has a marker?" I said, and then our group—all of us; every last one—broke down into a fit of laughter. It felt good, that laughter. Even the dourest among us couldn't stave off the giggle infection, and as we laughed with the thrill of victory and humor alike, relief filled my lungs like a gulp of pure oxygen. I wore my grin without restraint, happiness like electricity in my veins.
Hiei had won his match just as he was supposed to. Just as canon dictated, he unleashed the new and improved Dragon of the Darkness Flame, destroyed half the stadium, and fell asleep with a win under his belt. Just like Kurama's match had gone to plan, so too had Hiei's. Only with far less blood, just as canon dictated once again.
Two fights down, and two to go.
We were so close to the finish line, I could taste it.
Making do with what we had, Kuwabara used a chunk of the broken ring as a makeshift study table. He'd spread his homework out before him in an array of worksheets and study guides, ink and pencil and highlighter dotting the pages like weird, eclectic rain. I sat across from him with the tournament rulebook opened on my lap, reading through it whenever Kuwabara didn't require my attention. I'd tried to persuade him to study in the locker room, rather than the middle of the noisy stadium, but no dice. He liked the natural light courtesy of the enormous window Hiei's dragon had opened in the side of the stadium, he said, and he'd study here.
"And besides," Kuwabara had argued. "What if the committee pulls some bullshit and says we're disqualified because we're late? Nah. Somebody's gotta stay here to keep an eye on things, and that somebody might as well be me."
Kuwabara, it must be said, is a stubborn individual. He camped out while the rest of our group scattered to the winds, most of them promising as they left to be mindful of the buddy system. There's a reason girls should go to the bathroom in groups, as I reminded Botan, Yukina and Atsuko.
But I had bigger things to worry about than my friends. Pointing at Kuwabara's massive spread of homework, I glowered at him and said, "Can't believe you haven't even touched your spring break homework yet, Kuwabara."
He didn't look up from his history papers. "I've had other crap on my mind lately, all right?" he said around the pen he held between his teeth. "Namely not getting murdered in the next fight."
"Wait a minute." My glower intensified. "Did you leave all of this till the last minute on purpose?"
"Well, yeah. Of course!" he said. "If I'm gonna die, I don't wanna have wasted my last days on a stupid English project." When I didn't protest (because he had a point, much though I didn't want to admit it) he shot me a cocky grin. "But since we're currently all tied up and I plan on mopping the floor with that one stringy-haired Toguro brother…"
"You have to get it done, after all."
"Better now than on the boat ride home, right?"
"Probably." I pointed at his homework again. "Though don't let those worksheets get close to the ring. Hard to explain bloodstains to your teachers."
"Duh." Kuwabara rolled his eyes. "I know that much from experience."
As he lapsed into silence, concentration keen on his homework, I leaned back against a chunk of stone that had formerly been a part of the fighting ring, fingers thumbing the edges of the rulebook sitting on my lap. It had been several hours since Hiei's match, and he still hibernated right where I'd found him when I returned to the stadium. He needn't worry about missing anything in order to nap, though. The busted ring had prevented us from proceeding to the next match. I knew from canon that Toguro would eventually cart the old ring from the first stadium all the way here, but I wasn't entirely sure how long that feat would take. Had it been four hours in the manga, or six? I couldn't quite recall. I just knew we had a long road ahead, and that studying the rulebook would keep my mind off of what was sure to come.
Kuwabara's match was next, after all. And it was going to be quite a doozy, to borrow a phrase from Botan. Just wished we didn't have such a long break between matches, because all this waiting was driving me a bit batty.
Not that Kuwabara agreed. "Remind me to thank Hiei when he wakes up," he said after a few minutes, tapping his homework with his pencil. "This break sure is nice… although putting off the inevitable kind of sucks, too."
"Just focus on your homework," I said—both to him and to myself. My hands tightened around the rulebook's cover. "Any idea if Yusuke's completed a single bit of his?"
"Ha!" Kuwabara slapped his knee. "Who the heck do you think you're talking about?"
"Point taken." I glanced around. "Where the hell is he, even?"
"Said something about taking a walk." Kuwabara shrugged. "Said he'd be back soon, though."
Unfortunately, he was not back soon, which meant I couldn't nag him about doing homework with us. About an hour passed and I saw no sign of him, though I continued to look every few minutes in case he decided to show his face. Nothing changed, though. Hiei continued to sleep on his rock pillow; Kurama sat near Hiei while reading a book, green eyes fixed on the page. I looked over at the pair of them more than a few times, and eventually one of my glances coincided with Kurama looking up. Our eyes met, and he gave me a quick nod. I waved back, then quickly buried my nose in the rulebook once again.
"Hey. Keiko?"
I jumped at the sound of my name, but it was only Kuwabara. "What's up?" I said, hoping like heck that I wasn't blushing or something embarrassing. "Need something?"
"Don't look and give it away, but…" He leaned forward, closing a little of the distance between us. "Can we talk about Kurama?"
I'm ashamed to admit that I froze solid, a chill skating up my back at his request. My anxiety brain spiraled to the worst case scenario at once, and for a terrifying second I wondered if he'd somehow seen the exchange Kurama and I had shared outside the locker room. Kuwabara's head hung low, expression dark, teeth worrying his lower lip. Oh god, had he seen it? I took a deep breath on reflex, not sure what to say, not daring to hope that I was wrong.
Luckily Kuwabara didn't leave me in suspense for long. He took a deep breath of his own, paused, then asked, "Does Kurama… does he have an issue with me or something?"
My mind went blank. "Huh?"
"You know." He shot a furtive glance my way before looking once more at his homework. "Does he have an issue with me? Like, does he not like me or something?"
"What are you talking about?" I said, flummoxed. "Of course he likes you. You're friends!"
But Kuwabara just sighed. "I thought that, too, but…"
"But what?"
"It's nothing big." Kuwabara shrugged. "Nothing I can really point at with a spotlight, if that makes sense. I've just been getting this feeling that Kurama… that he has some sort of problem with me."
"You don't have any examples of what you mean?"
His face grew a little ruddy at the question. "No, I do, it's just—it's just that they're small, so it might be that I'm overthinking everything. But I don't think I am." He waved vaguely at the air. "Last night in the team meeting, for instance, I said something about all of us getting killed, and he just… shrugged."
"He shrugged," I repeated.
"Well, I mean he said something, but it was basically a shrug," Kuwabara said. "Normally he'd say something kind of funny and smart that made me feel better, but he just didn't." His eyes darkened again, two black points in his lean face. "And then there was this morning."
"This morning?"
"Yeah, in the locker rooms. He brought up something I said last night, and then he just kind of laughed and walked out of the room before I could explain what I'd meant."
"Oh." My face screwed up as I thought back. "I think I actually remember that one."
"You do?" Kuwabara said, relieved. "I'm glad it's not just me, then."
"Yeah, but I thought he was just stressed, not that he was mad at you or something."
"Well, it's happened enough times for me to think he's mad, or at least annoyed, or something." His voice dropped lower, nearly to a whisper I had to strain to hear over the murmur of the crowd still left inside the fractured stadium. "And it's been happening ever since we figure out our parents might be dating."
"… I see." It took a bit of effort to keep my face neutral, but I did my best impression of a poker face to ask, "You think he's mad about that?"
"What else could this be about?" Kuwabara said. "He's been off ever since then, like he's icing me out or something." Looking down and away, he admitted, "But I haven't talked to Shizuru about it to see if he's the same way with her, though."
He made a good point. If Kurama really was salty about his mother dating Kuwabara's father, it made no sense that he'd be mad at Kuwabara but not Shizuru. And since Kurama had rejected my offer to talk about the situation regarding his mother, I got the feeling he wouldn't take kindly to Kuwabara marching over and demanding a heart-to-heart.
"I'd talk to Shizuru and see if she's been getting the same feelings as you," I said. "And I'd wait until this is all over to talk to Kurama himself about it." When Kuwabara's eyes narrowed, confusion turning down his lips, I added, "He's already finished with his match, but you can't be distracted during yours, so if this turns out to be a big deal, I don't think it's wise to go digging just yet."
"That makes sense," he relented, and then a smile broke across his face. "You always know what to do, huh?"
"Not always," I said at once. When he looked a little surprised at my vehemence, I smiled. "It's easier to see someone else's issues than it is to see your own, and it's much easier to give advice than it is to take it. Especially when that advice is your own. I don't always give myself the best advice, basically."
"But see?" Kuwabara said. "You even knew to say that!"
He started to say something else, but he stopped himself and picked up his pencil again. He didn't start writing, though. He just tapped the eraser against the papers before him, beating a quick, agitated rhythm against the stone beneath. Kuwabara didn't look at me, and the smile had leached from his face like water down a drain.
"What's wrong?" I said, because something obviously was. "Are you OK?"
Kuwabara looked at me from underneath his brow, barely able to meet my eyes. "He really hasn't brought any of this up to you?" he said. "None of it?"
"No." I shook my head. "No, he has not."
But Kuwabara didn't appear convinced. "You two are so close. Everyone can see it," he said after the smallest of hesitations. "So I guess I just thought…"
"I promise that he hasn't said a word, Kuwabara." Voice firm, gaze steady, I tried to look as sincere as possible, because something told me that's what Kuwabara was looking for. "It's true that we're close, but that doesn't mean he's in the habit of spilling his guts about everything, either." A beat, and then I admitted, "I did ask him about all of this, though."
Kuwabara's head jerked up. "You did?"
"Yes. And he changed the subject almost immediately." I smiled a smile that I hoped didn't look like a grimace. "Maybe he's waiting for all the dust to settle before talking to you about it, too."
"You're probably right," Kuwabara relented after a few seconds' thought. He made a face like he'd swallowed a mouthful of coffee grounds. "Though putting off telling the truth puts a bad taste in my mouth, even if I think it's the right thing to do."
My heart stuttered. "I can imagine," I murmured—and I tapped his homework with a fingertip, uncomfortable. "Now enough about that. You want me to check your work?"
"Would you?"
"Sure."
Gratitude filled his eyes and voice alike, warm and overflowing. "Thanks for everything, Keiko," Kuwabara said. "I mean it."
My brows shot up. "Hmm?"
"Just… thanks. For being there for me." His earnest expression had lightened his eyes up again, all traces of his earlier trepidation gone. "I'm glad we're friends. I'm glad we met when we did. And I'm glad you're here."
"I'm glad to be here, too," I said—and because that look in his eye was far warmer than I wanted, I once more tapped the papers on the stone. "Now back to your homework."
"Right!" Lifting his pencil, Kuwabara declared with determination, "I'm gonna defeat it the same way I'm gonna defeat Toguro, just you watch!"
I knew in my gut he was right about that.
He had to be right about that—for all our sakes.
I was ready and waiting when Hiei's eyes finally cracked open, displaying ferocious red lines across his cooper skin. He didn't move for a moment. He lay perfectly still, surveying his surroundings like a cat stalking a bird—but when I leaned over him, he flinched.
"Hey, sleepyhead," I said. "You hungry?"
Hiei harrumphed and sat up, glaring at me until I produced a rice ball and a thermos of tea from my backpack. These he took without a word, but he didn't start eating. Instead he studied the thinned crowds of demons and the slant of the late afternoon sun, eyes widening a fraction when the reality of this sank in.
"What happened?" he demanded. "Did we win or lose?"
"Neither," I said. "Nothing's changed since your fight against Bui six hours ago."
"Six hours?" Now he really looked awake, eyes red and wide and full of fury. "Then who won the tournament?"
"No one." Kurama, who had walked up behind me, gave me a brief nod when I jumped, unnerved by his silent approach. "After your win, they called a halt to clear up the mess you made of the place."
Kurama looked pointedly behind Hiei at that, and Hiei turned to behold the missing section of stadium with a snort and a smirk, looking distinctly proud of himself. Like a cat that had successfully eaten a canary and would apologize to absolutely no one about it, more or less.
"Additionally, you kind of broke the ring into a hundred little pieces," I said, jerking my head toward the empty center of the arena floor.
"At first they were going to bring equipment in from the mainland to transport the ring from the old stadium to this one," Kurama added, "but Toguro volunteered to bring it, instead." His lips twitched at the corner as he suppressed a smile. "A tribute to your stunning efforts, Hiei."
"They've been busy clearing the rubble away in the meantime," I said, "and we just had a 30 minute warning to get to our seats. But we haven't actually seen Toguro and the ring yet—oh!"
I'd spoken too soon. A vibration lanced up my foot from the earth below, and then another followed, and another. Soon the thuds echoed on the air, too, audible as well as tactile as something very heavy plodded toward us. I knew exactly what it would be, and with my heart in my mouth I turned toward the broken portion of the stadium to watch Toguro's grand entrance. A hush had fallen over the crowd, and as the minutes wore on, soon a strange column of stone rose as Toguro climbed the slight incline leading into the broken side of the stadium. The enormous stone ring from the other stadium, perhaps two hundred feet in diameter, had been balanced precariously between the huge man's shoulder blades with precarious precision. He looked like an ant lugging around a manhole cover without effort, and as he toiled his way into the stadium, the demons began to howl their approval.
Out of nowhere, Yusuke and Kuwabara appeared, skidding to a stop beside us as they stared with open-mouthed amazement at Toguro's feat of strength. The girls arrived not long later, and only Shizuru had the self-control to keep her mouth from falling open at the sight.
"Holy cow!" Yusuke said.
Kuwabara had hone a bit pale. "What a monster."
"We heard him coming from all the way in the locker room and came running," Botan said, only a little out of breath. "And I'm glad we did, because I wouldn't believe this if I wasn't looked at it with my own two eyes!"
She was right about that; it was an utterly unbelievable event to witness, even more impressive in real life than it had been when rendered in the anime series. We watched in silence as the demons in the remaining stands hollered and hooted and carried on, cries growing louder and louder the closer Toguro came to the laying down the ring. Despite the baying demons, this felt like the calm before the storm. Clearly once this was over and the new ring had been installed, events would move at a blistering pace.
Was everyone ready for that?
Was I?
Yukina tugged on Botan's sleeve. "So does this mean the next match is about to start?" she asked. When Botan nodded, Yukina said, "We'd better go find our seats."
Shizuru tossed her cigarette butt and ground it into the arena dirt with her heel. "I'll walk you."
"Thanks," Botan said. "Well, girls. Let's—"
Before she could finish, Yusuke's eyes swept over us. "Hey, wait a sec—where's my mom, anyway?" he said as he took a few steps in our direction. "Wasn't she with you?"
Botan rolled her eyes, looking for all the world like a tired kindergarten teacher. "She heard a rumor about someone selling moonshine on the upper decks, and she ran off before I could catch her."
And Yusuke rolled his eyes, too. "That booze hound," he said, but without any venom. "Can't even watch her own son's match without chugging something alcoholic!"
"She'll be back," I told him with a smile. "She wouldn't miss this for the world."
But he didn't look particularly convinced. "She'd better not," was all he said, and he turned to march to the edge of the arena, where he waited with back pressed against the partition between the audience and the fighting ring.
It was a clear dismissal, if I ever saw one. Waving at Yusuke (who only nodded in return), I gave Kurama and Hiei a nod before favoring Kuwabara with a winning grin. He shot me a thumbs up and an enormous smile at the sight, cocky as I'd ever seen him.
"Don't sweat it, Keiko. I've got this one in the bag!" he said.
"I know you do," I said. "See y'all on the other side."
"Kick their butts!" Botan added.
"Good luck," said Yukina.
"Try not to die, baby bro," Shizuru said—and when he sputtered something about jinxing him, she laughed and led the rest of us away, back toward our place in the stands.
Not long later, there came a terrific crash as Toguro lowered the ring to the ground. He had perfect control of the heavy circle of stone, but given how heavy the ring was, dirt born on a cold burst of air still stung our faces and back. I shoved Yukina and Botan ahead of me, trying to shield them a little from the wave of debris. When it died down, I turned to ask Shizuru if she'd fared OK—but she wasn't just behind me like I'd thought she was. Instead I found her a good twelve feet behind us, staring back the way we'd come at her brother's retreating figure.
"Shizuru?" I said. "What's wrong?"
She didn't turn around. "Just hoping my brother pulled a leaf out of your book and meant what he said."
"What?"
She shook her head. "The elder Toguro approached him earlier, after Hiei's match. You were still outside when it happened. It was an act of intimidation, and I hate to say that it worked. Kazuma's been jittery ever since." She looked at me over her shoulder for a moment, but only just. "You calmed him down a little, though."
I looked away, embarrassed. "He's gonna be fine. Promise."
Shizuru didn't say anything for a little while. Her hands wandered to her pockets, and she pulled out a cigarette and lit up with easy, practiced fingers.
"I hope you're right," was all she said. "You usually are." A breath of blue smoke filled the air, hazy and dim. "But this time, I really need you to be right."
Without another word, she walked past me and up the steps toward our seats in the stands. Yukina and Botan were already there by the time we caught up; our seats had been saved by a few demons Shizuru had intimidated into subservience, so we had no issue sitting back down and preparing for the next match. There was no sign of Atsuko, however, but she was typically late to most things, so this wasn't terribly alarming in and of itself. I put her to the back of my mind as we fell into tense silence, watching and waiting as demons filled the remaining seats across all of the unbroken sections still left in the dissected stadium. On the die of the stadium now missing… y'know, walls and stuff? Demons filled the gap there, held back from rushing the ring by a strand of guards in blue uniforms. These demons cried out the loudest, screaming to be let in closer so they could smell the rotten humans' blood.
My pulse beat a little quicker when I picked up on a chant rising from some of the demonic onlookers. 'Kill Yusuke, kill Yusuke!' rang out like a hundred struck bells, and my knee began to jiggle up and down in time with their horrible cries. My heartbeat ran at an exhausting pace to match. All at once I could smell roasting meat from various concessions stands, and the reek of unwashed bodies, and the scents of old blood and disturbed earth. My mouth tasted of dust and stone and the sour taste of anxiety. The air felt cold despite the spring day outside, and the light streaking into the stadium burned my eyes like they'd been doused in saltwater.
It's no wonder, then, that I noticed when the lights inside the stadium dimmed; even the smallest reduction in light felt good, although the effect of that was somewhat diminished when the jumbotron above the ring flickered to life. The TV was badly damaged, picture on it thread and full of static, but we could still discern the shape of Juri's pretty face as she raised a microphone to her mouth.
"And now," she said, words full of grave importance, "the moment you've been waiting for… the third match of the Dark Tournament finals is about to begin!"
The reaction was as immediate as it was unmistakable: The demons in the stadium flipped the hell out, screaming and roaring and booing and cheering in a cacophony of discordant noise. They roared louder when a spotlight in the rafters burst into being, illuminating the forms of the two Toguro brothers and Sakyo standing to the north of the ring. The short and slender form of the elder Toguro separated from them a moment later, leaping into the ring before stalking slow toward its center, spotlight trailing him all the while.
"And in this corner," Juri said, "we have the representative for the favorites to win this whole thing—a fighter known for his brutality and viciousness, it's the elder of the Toguro brothers!"
The demons around us screamed even louder than before. Botan grabbed my hand and gripped it tight, fingers digging into my palm like a warm and fleshy vice. But then another spotlight flickered on, pool of illumination trained upon the shapes of Team Urameshi standing to the ring's due south.
"And opposite him, we have the fighter from the tournament's dark horse team, and one of only three humans participating in this year's matches," Juri said, voice booming over the PA system as Kuwabara broke away from his friends. "He's an underdog with a shoddy track record, but still—give it up for Kuwabara of Team Urameshi!"
As Kuwabara climbed into the ring, the demons screamed again. The tenor of these screams rang differently than the previous, peppered by booing and hissing and screams for death and the breaking of bones. Kuwabara met the screams with two middle fingers to the sky, strutting into the ring with the ends of his white coat billowing behind him on an unfelt wind. I laughed aloud at the sight, although the sound vanished beneath the tide of the demons' roar. Shizuru, meanwhile, stared a few nearby demons into silence. These demons raised a meek chorus of cheers for Kuwabara, instead, though hardly anyone could them.
"It's a match with a clear favorite to win, but we've been surprised before, and anything can happen here at the Dark Tournament." Koto's voice boomed above the demons' like thunder. "So without further ado… let the third match of the final round, begin!"
Botan's hand tightened around mine, and this time, I gripped it back—because down in the ring, Kuwabara had reached into his pocket and raised something high into the air. The jumbotron depicted the sword hilt in his hand in all its simple glory, but the picture wavered and warped when Kuwabara summoned his Spirit Sword. At once, I could see why. It didn't look anything like the sword Kuwabara had summoned in his previous matches. This one glowed brilliant copper instead of watery yellow, radiating rainbow sparks so bright I had to shield my eyes from its luminous luster. Given the way the others gasped, the sword must have been even brighter in their eyes, and around us, demons innumerable shrank back from the sight, seemingly burned by its light even from a distance.
But Kuwabara was no distance fighter. Sword summoned, he launched himself forward with a yell of fury, sprinting full-tilt across the ring toward the elder Toguro's black-clad figure—and when he brought the sword down in a swinging arc, the elder Toguro brother did not move. The sword cut him in half from shoulder to opposite hip with a spray of bright red blood, discrete halves of his body sagging in opposite directions.
Kuwabara stared at the elder Toguro in disbelief. So did everyone else in the stadium. For a second, no one—demons and humans and announcers alike—said a word. But then Koto's voice boomed once more over the PA, disbelief and bloodlust waging war in her bright tirade.
"I don't believe it!" Koto said. "He did it! He actually did it! Kuwabara lands the first strike with his Spirit Sword, a vicious slash that—wait a second!?"
It's a testament to Koto's reflexes that she saw what was happening with such speed. The ground thirty feet behind Kuwabara buckled, and in a shower of stone that spot exploded, lances of weird, fleshy matter streaking through the air toward Kuwabara's exposed back. Even with Koto's cry of warning, Kuwabara couldn't react in time, although he tried to. The spears that had erupted from the ground struck him in the side and shoulder, piercing his body until blood like blooming roses stained the white fabric of Kuwabara's coat. Kuwabara stumbled, sword vanishing in a crack of light, going down in a heap as the lances retracted, blood spurting from his wounds like miniature geysers. The jumbotron depicted it all in agonizing detail, just as it captured Toguro's cleft-in-twain form disappear, sucked down into the stone ring and out of sight. The stone of the ring buckled and broke, cracking as something moved beneath its surface, Toguro's body and the strange spears meeting only a few feet away from Kuwabara's kneeling form. Then, like a creature from the black lagoon, Toguro rose from the rubble of the ring, body whole and hale.
But his right hand wasn't that—whole or hale or even a hand, really. From Toguro's arm sprouted a bulbous, man-sized mass of flesh shaped precisely like… himself. Another life-size Toguro attached to Toguro's arm in place of his hand, this one cut in two from Kuwabara's strike. The fingers of his other hand were just as grotesque, lengthened past the point of sanity and extending into the cracked ring. These were what he had used to stab Kuwabara, body manipulated into a distorted weapon unthinkable.
"I can't believe it!" Koto screamed. "The Elder Toguro manipulated his body to create a clone of himself—well, a body double extension? I'm not sure what the term for it actually is, people, but it looks like he hid his real body under the ring and made a clone of himself out of his hand, all so he could lull Kuwabara into a false sense of security and attack him from behind!" The jumbotron cut to an image of Toguro's grinning face, stringy grey hair and beady black eyes the very image of sadism and evil—and that's before he started liking Kuwabara's blood off of his elongated fingers. Koto shrieked, "How demented! I love it!"
Shizuru, unaffected as always, only muttered, "He's a sneaky bastard, I'll give him that."
"Kuwabara can't afford to let down his guard again," Botan said, hand still a vice around my own. "But luckily it looks like it was just a flesh wound."
I couldn't reply to either of them. I just stared in morbid silence as Kuwabara rose to his feet, summoning his sword a second time, my heart galloping at max speed against the cage of my too-tight ribs. I gripped Botan's hand right back, my nails digging into her so hard I saw her wince—but before she could say a word, the jumbotron above the ring flickered. I braced myself for some close-up shot of Kuwabara's wounds, or perhaps of his agonized face, but that didn't come. Instead there came a burst of feedback, a ripple of static, and then the image coalesced into something else entirely.
"What the heck?" Koto said over the PA as a single yellow eyeball filled the screen. "Who the hell are you supposed to be?"
The face on the jumbotron pulled back a hair, yellow eye joined by a second, along with a slotted reptilian nose and skin pattered with glittery blue scales. The demon—because it had to be a demon—tapped on the camera lens a few times, fingertip almost blotting out the jumbotron's screen.
"Hey. Hey!" he said, voice a rasp of sandpaper on plaster. "Can you hear me over there?" Another tap or two. "Hello-oh?"
Down in the ring, Kuwabara's hand fell to his side. Even Toguro stared up from the ring with eyes narrowed, intent upon the screen as the lizard-man pulled back a little more. Another lizard stood beside him, the pair crowded into the frame. The new guy was purple instead of blue, but otherwise, they looked almost identical.
"Camera looks like it's on," the blue one said. "But—"
The purple guy tapped at his ear; an earpiece, probably. "Yeah, we got a live feed." He spread his hands out in welcome, staring at the camera with an enormous, toothy grin. "Hi, all you tournament fans out there. Enjoying the show?"
Unimpressed, Shizuru muttered, "What the hell is this?"
"Hey, this is my tournament, not yours!" Koto yelled. "Get off my screen, now!"
The demons ignored her entirely, blue demon picking up where his purple friend left off. "I hope you're having a great time, but it's about to get a whole lot better, because we've got a special message for Yusuke Urameshi we'd like to share."
One of the jumbotron's other screens flashed, bringing up a shot of Yusuke's startled face.
"A gift, you might say," said Blue from the other screen.
"Yeah," said Purple. "A gift from us to you!"
"A gift?" Botan said, staring aghast at the lizard demons. "What in the world are they—?"
The demons stepped aside.
Botan's jaw snapped shut with a click of teeth.
"Oh." Yukina's hands flew to her mouth, covering it with shaking finger. "Oh, no!"
Behind the demons sat a chair, and bound to it with lengths of knotted rope sat a human. A familiar human, head hanging on the end of her neck, curtain of dark hair hiding her face from view. Still, I knew exactly who she was even before a third demon—a red lizard, this time—grabbed her by the chin and forced her face upright. She wrenched her chin away from him and glared, though the intimidating effect was somewhat diminished since one eye had swollen nearly shut beneath a spreading bruise. She continued to glare even as he lifted a clawed hand and placed it at her throat, favoring the camera with a horrible, ghoulish grin.
"Botan." Her name slipped out on an exhale, so quiet it's a wonder she heard me at all. "How long ago did you say she ran off looking for beer?"
"A—a while." Botan's face had paled to the color of sour milk. "But I thought she had just gotten lost, or—"
But Purple started talking again, cutting her off with his booming voice. "For the demons out there who don't understand what this big reveal means, exactly, or who this lovely lady is…"
"This is the fragile human mother of none of than Yusuke Urameshi!" said Blue with undisguised relish. "Say hi to your fans, sweetie!"
Atsuko spat at his feet. "Fuck you!"
"Oh, a spitfire!" said Red, grinning down at her. "We like that in a hostage, don't we, boys?"
"You can say that again!" Purple yelled back, and whatever Blue said after that was lost to the din of the crowd. The demons around us, now caught up and in the loop, had all begun to bellow and scream at once, yelling that this served the dirty humans right and that they should kill the woman and be done with it. As if hearing them, Atsuko shot a middle finger at the camera and then tried to bite a chunk out of Red's arm, but he dodged away before she could sink her teeth in. In retaliation, Red grabbed her by the hair and jaw, grinning at the camera as he smashed his fingers into her bruised face.
"Well, Urameshi! What're you waiting for?" he cooed. "Your dear old mama ain't got much time left, ya feel me?"
"So you'd better hurry, or your mom might not live to see you fight!" Purple added with a cackle.
On his screen, Yusuke's livid face turned nearly the color of Purple's scales. "What the hell kind of game are you playing, Toguro?" he bellowed, voice caught on some hidden microphone and broadcasted for all the world to hear. "I thought you wanted a real fight! This is dirty and you know it!"
Purple (who apparently could hear us, somehow) shook a finger at the camera. "Oh, don't be mad at him, Urameshi. He ain't got nothin' to do with this."
Yusuke retorted, "Then that goddamn committee had better—"
The camera cut away from him and to the younger Toguro, standing beside Sakyo at the edge of the ring. "It's not their doing, either, considering they're all dead. I killed them myself," he said in his deep voice, and murmurs rippled through the crowd at this revelation. "And rest assured that this is not what I had in mind when it came to our eventual faceoff."
The crowd reacted with confusion at that, whispering amongst themselves at this strange turn of events—the turn of events that had turned my stomach to a mass of quivering knots even before they revealed Atsuko strapped to that chair, a hostage held who knows where and by captors unknown. But as the camera cut back to Yusuke's face, eyes colored by grief and fear and anger all at once, the numbness spreading throughout my chest broke into two sharp pieces. I jolted from my seat and took the stairs two at a time down toward the ring, stopping only at Koto's announcement booth along the way. She opened it when I neared, shock on her face almost a match for mine.
"Hey! Hey!" I said, hunkering down outside the booth to glare up at her confused face. "Do you know what this is about? Who's doing this?"
"No. No, I don't," she said, and then her expression turned toward fury. "But I will personally maim and murder whoever did this! We came here to see fights, not family dramas! Forget Yusuke, because I am going to kill—"
Above us, Blue's smarmy voice boomed, "Oh Urameshi? You still there, or are you gonna come rescue your sweet little mommy, huh?"
His taunts sounded satisfied. Oily. Unctuous and self-assured—and as he gave another cackle, and as Koto's eyes lit up with understanding as sudden as it was strange, it clicked for me, too. Although Koto had started to speak to me again, I didn't wait to listen. I already knew what she was going to say, and I pelted away for her and leapt over the partition and down into the ring, bolting toward the spot where Yusuke stood with Kurama and Hiei beside the ring. He had just started to peel away from Kurama and Hiei when I reached him and threw my arms around his bicep, thanking my lucky stars that I'd managed to reach him in time.
"Yusuke," I said. "Yusuke, wait!"
"Wait for what, Keiko?" he said, shoving at me and squirming, trying to wriggle from my grip. "For them to kill my goddamn mom?"
"Just listen to me—!"
"Hey!" said Red, voice a booming sneer in the too-hot stadium air. "We not make it clear enough that we're gonna gut your mother like a fish if you don't come and find her, huh?"
"She's not far away, you know!" Blue jeered. "You could track her down if you tried, we promise."
"But just in case the look on her face isn't persuasive enough…" said Purple.
We looked up in time to see Purple grab the camera, carrying it with a jolt and a bounce in Atsuko's direction. The field of view plummeted and swept along the floor in a dizzying shot of red carpet shot through with threads of gold, and soon he lifted it high and trained it on Atsuko's face. A hand tipped in claws entered the picture a second later, reaching for Atsuko's cheek so it could—
Something in me spasmed. I looked away just in time to avoid seeing them cut her cheek open, but judging from the look of horror and fury on Yusuke's face, he had no such luck. He watched through open, unblinking, irate eyes as Atsuko's bellow of pain rent the air, the demons in the stadium raising a chorus of cheers to the sky at the tortured sound. But then Atsuko's scream quieted, and there came the unmistakable sound of someone hocking a loogie, and I looked up in time to see her spit it directly into Red's disgusted face. Immediately he retaliated with a punch, her head lolling again from the force of his closed fist.
"We like spitfires," said Red with cold detachment, "but we don't like them that much."
"Son of a bitch, get your goddamn hands off of my mother!" Yusuke roared.
But Blue just winked. "Save that fury for us, huh?"
"You'd better hurry, or your mom might not live to see you fight!" added Purple.
"Say bye bye now, sweetheart!" said Red, grabbing Atsuko's hand so he could force her to wave it.
"Bye bye!" said Blue, and then the feed went dead.
The light had died in Yusuke's eyes by that point, too. "That does it," he said with the cold quiet of a killer on the hunt. "Let go of me, Keiko. Let go of me right now."
I didn't reply, nor did I comply. Not right away, at least, and that was too long for Yusuke—for this suddenly dead-eyed young man, whom I had never seen look this way before. But then the chill in his gaze warmed a bit, and there was the Yusuke I knew and loved once more, standing before me with uncertainty and agitation.
"She's my mom, Keiko," he growled. "I gotta go track her down and stick my foot right up those sorry demons' assho—"
"Yusuke, wait!" The words burst forth like a firework, spitting and hot. "You can't go! You'd be giving them what they want!"
"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"They're baiting you into leaving. You, specifically—the team captain." I gestured at the stadium, over at Koto, at the jumbotron and the roaring crowd. "If a team captain abandons the stadium for any reason once a match has started, it's grounds for team disqualification."
He did a double-take. "Wait, what? How do you even know that?"
"Koto gave me a copy of the rulebook and I've been doing my best to memorize it," I explained in a mad rush. "I'm just lucky I read the section about this in time; that thing's a doorstopper!"
But Hiei did not appear convinced. "So you say," he said, tossing his hair with disdain, "but Toguro didn't even show up to half of his team's fights."
"There's no penalty if a caption doesn't show up—only if he leaves," Kurama said, looking at me with grim determination. "And the committee, rest their souls, never pulled a card on him the way they enjoyed pulling one on us. They no doubt cut slack, in his case."
"But if the committee's dead, who's gonna make that call then, huh?" Yusuke retorted. "No one, that's who."
"Actually, Koto might. Juri might, too," I said. "They're dedicated to this insane spectacle, committee or no committee. So you can't leave." I clung to him harder, shaking my head over and over again. "I know you feel like you need to, but you can't! You just can't!"
He started to reply.
Someone else spoke first.
"She's right, you know," came that taunting, wheedling voice I very quickly would not be able to stand. He spoke with maddening calm and ponderous pace, every word a knife he meant to twist for maximum infliction of pain. "Leave now, Urameshi Yusuke, and you might just have to watch all of your little friends die… because if we win, their deaths will be the subject of my winner's wish."
The elder Toguro loomed and leered not far from us, just on the edge of the ring nearest where we stood. He greying skin stretched around the shape of his distorted grin, eyes glinting with sadistic glee as he stared down the length of his long nose in our direction. Kuwabara had run up behind him, but he stood a few paces back with sword raised, watching with confusion as Toguro giggled, shoulders jouncing under the cover of his dark suit.
But Kurama wasn't fazed by the giggle, the glare or his cutting words. He just raised his head and said, words cold as a knife in a glacier, "Judging by that ugly smile on your hideous face, you know who's behind this. Don't you, Toguro?"
Toguro laughed again, a cackle that sounded like dead leaves and cracking bones. "My younger brother might want a fair fight, but I have never been one to turn down an advantage."
"So this is your doing!" Kurama spat.
"This is low, even for you!" Kuwabara shouted.
"For once, the oaf and I are in agreement," Hiei said, a wall of heat pulsing from his body in a scalding rush. "I knew you had no honor, but to resort to this spectacle is sheer cowardice and nothing more."
Yusuke moved to the front of our group, walking toward Toguro step by measured step. Even my mundane eyes couldn't mistake the glow building in his fingertip for anything other than what it was; I let go of his arm, watching with hand pressed to my mouth and heart beating like a jackhammer as he stalked toward the man who had, apparently, had some hand in kidnapping his mother.
"What?" Yusuke said, the word an icy bullet—one broadcasted loud and clear through the PA system, his face a mask of cold fury on the jumbotron. "You know we're about to kick your asses, so you pull some lame James Bond villain stunt like this? Not confident enough in your own power; is that it?"
Toguro raised his head with another insane giggle. "It's not my power that's in question."
"The hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means that you're not asking the right questions, nor are you asking them of the right people." His head listed to one side, angle deranged and smile revolting. "But then again, you've been kept so very in the dark, haven't you, Urameshi?"
"What the hell are you talking about?" Yusuke fired back.
But Toguro just smiled. He lifted a finger. He lifted it high into the air, and then he brought it down in a single, decisive point even more deadly than the strikes his fingers had landed on Kuwabara.
He wasn't pointing at Yusuke, though.
He wasn't point at Kurama, or even Hiei.
He was pointing past them—straight, it seemed, at me.
"Why don't you ask her?" Toguro said with another sickening, simpering giggle. "Pose that question to your little friend there, clinging to your arm, fighting so desperately for you to stay. Ask—Keiko, was it?" He laughed again. "Ah, yes. Ask Keiko. Because she knows exactly what I'm talking about."
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then, as one, they turned to face me—and I, at long last, had to face the music.
NOTES
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR THREE GODDAMN YEARS—
Ahem.
BIG CONGRATS TO ALL WINNERS of the CHAPTER 100 GIVEAWAY! The winners are as follows:
GRAND PRIZE, winner of the YYH Steelbook plus a one-shot: MUSIQUEMER
1st PRIZE, winner of the $25 Amazon card (courtesy of Moongeist) plus a one-shot: MISS IDEOPHOBIA
2nd PRIZE, winners of one-shots of their choosing: MIDKNIGHT OWL, STERLING BEE, KUESUNO and ELEMENTICY
I will be contacting all winners, so please be looking out for my message (or send one to me if you feel like it and are bored, haha) for details on how to claim your prizes. I ended up extending the second place prize from three to four winners because I accidentally pulled an extra name, saw who it was and felt too bad to put it back. I WOULD HAVE LIVED WITH THE GUILT FOR YEARS. What this says about me as a person, I have no idea! XD
Seriously, though: You are all winners in my book. I'm so thrilled to have heard from you on chapter 100, and it seriously made my day to have you here to celebrate this milestone. I am infinitely grateful to each and every one of you for your support. I'll try to hold another giveaway (perhaps at my million word milestone) in the future, because it's the least I can do to pay back this fandom for all of the love it's shown Lucky Child. I love you all to pieces, and to the stars and back!
Huge, enormous, unending thanks to these folks for coming out in support of chapter 100: MissIdeophobia, RE Zera, Domitia Ivory, rezgurnk, SuzyQBeats, noble phantasm, Lady Milk-Tea, wordsflowfreely, Mia, Vienna22, Neurotic-Pansexual, dbzfangirl13, Forthwith16, DatScoutPlz, Yakiitori, Vyxen Hexgrim, Sorlian, read a rainbow, xenocanaan, kittenfood, YourHomeGirlJen, SanguineSky, KurokamiHaruhi, Kaiya Azure, riceberri, Lady Skynet, MyMidnightShadow, NewCanvas, EdenMae, SterlingBee, C S Stars, Kitty-ryn, A Wraith, setokayba2n, Heliumbamboo, Call Brig On Over, Shaded Eclipse, DeusVenenare, tehquilamockingburd, Aven the BattleMage, JUSTINEFANDIALAN, RedPanda923, morpheusandmuse, Sesshomarus'Luver, sunchased, IronDBZ, WaYaADisi1, DaurthNoS, Melissa Fairy, Kuesuno, hoshikasa, cestlavie, buzzk97, NightlyKill, ninja-of-twilight, Baoh joestar, cezarina, StrawberryHuggles, MiYuki Kurama, MyWorldHeartBeating, KonekoNoRenkinjutsushi, Choco-latte64, MetrokNeko, tammywammy9, mothedman, Kirie Mitsuru, vodka-and-tea, Neko-Mitsuko, MysticWorld71891, smilesy, OdinsReaper, Pelawen Night, Silverwing013, Convoluted Compassion, AnimePleaseGood, Evalyd Yamazaki, Nameless-sinner, KhaleesiRenee, Flen99, DeathAngel457, bluerose921, LadyEllesmere, SnowSprite88, yaoiangel00, Konohamaya Uzumaki, Maya33, ZippyZappy, FanaRain, LonelyDreamer7, Freaky Shannon-igans, gazim0n, Yumeutsutsu, Kitsune-Queen91, CaelynM, nequam-tenshi, JenGurl24!
And additional unending thanks to these fine folks and friends for leaving a comment on chapter 101: noble phantasm, RE Zera, Theproblemadult, vodka-and-tea, C S Stars, Kitty-ryn, EdenMae, xenocanaan, Lucinda17, Forthwith16, Kaiya Azure, a, Melissa Fairy, Call Brig on Over, KhaleesiRenee, Evanelle, Sorlian, Vienna22, WhatWouldValeryDo, read a rainbow, A Wraith, MyWorldHeartBeating, AnimePleaseGood, bluerose921, IronDBZ, setokayba2n, RedPanda923, Lady Ellesmere, Kuesono, MetroNeko, tammywammy9, Konohamaya Uzumaki, Neko-Mitsuko, buzzk97, KurokamiHaruhi, ShadedEclipse, SterlingBee, biku-sensei-sez-meow, cestlavie and guests!
I think/hope that's everyone. Sincere thanks, once again, because you guys literally make my world go 'round. I could not have written this much this fast without you, and I look forward to the rest of this journey with you. I love you all to pieces. Thanks so much for ready Lucky Child. With you, I'm a lucky girl indeed.
