Warnings: Finally! A few answers. To a LOT of questions.
The Welder of BlackFire:
The Legend Lives Part II-Rose's Renaissance
Chapter Four: Meeting with Rose
Kurama and Hiei looked at a house from the street, casting their gazes over it suspiciously and with caution. Hiei could hardly suppress the pain he felt at seeing the building. So familiar, and yet, it lacked the feeling that had poured from its doors when Thorn had occupied it. Kurama glanced at the fire youkai beside him quickly, then turned his eyes back toward the building.
"This the house?" the kitsune asked quietly, smoothly, as to not crack the glass that held back throbbing emotions within his friend. Hiei nodded curtly, a short, jerky movement. Kurama looked over the house once more and began to walk forward, trusting that Hiei would follow behind him. Hiei paused a moment, thoughts galloping through his mind before shaking them away and walking forward to following Kurama, who had, by now, stepped up on the porch and stood waiting for him. Hiei moved to stand next to him as he knocked on the door with his usual firm modesty.
"Coming!" came a voice from inside. Hiei could recognize it as the voice of the woman who he had seen on the porch, rummaging through her purse in search of keys.
Flashback
"Make sure you close the windows before it rains!" came a strangely familiar feminine voice, marred only by age and experience. Hiei looked up to see a fairly tall woman on the porch, purse in hand, shouting back into the house while scratching through the bag, in search of an unseen object.
"Don't worry about it," came a exasperated, younger, darker version of the voice from inside. Thorn's voice.
"Okay. I'll talk to you tomorrow, honey." The woman turned away, finding the keys she had been looking for, and walked toward a large car. She got in and turned it on, making the engine rumble and spit before grumbling steadily. She pulled out of the driveway and sped down the street.
End Flashback
The approached quickly from another room, opening the door to greet them.
"Hello," she said, glancing from one to the other with hazy gray-blue eyes. "Can I help you?"
"Yes, is Rose home please?" Kurama asked in his quiet and very polite voice. She hesitated a moment before nodding, looking them over as any concerned mother might.
"Yes, hold on a moment please," she said. She turned around, letting the screen door slam gently behind her. "Rose!" she called. "You have company dear!"
Hiei and Kurama looked at each other knowingly. Hopefully they would get to speak with her. Perhaps she would hear them out. The people in the area were kind, polite. No doubt the girl had been brought up to be as well.
The woman turned back to them.
"Hold on just a second," she said, walking away quickly and calling the girl's name again.
"I'm coming," came the soft growl. Hiei straightened as she rounded the corner. Confusion filtered through her eyes as she walked up to the door, opening it to look at them. She was still in her school clothes and without her hair obscuring the front of her shirt, they saw that the words 'Dark Royalty' were emblaze on its front, blue flames jumping around the letters in a greedy hunger, giving the shirt a shuddering, dark mood.
"Is there something I can help you with, Shuichi, is it? And Blade?" she questioned, her thoughts weary and questioning. The two new boys. What would they want with her? She studied them, something in her mind clicking but unable to tell her why she felt so familiar with them. The world fuzzed before her eyes very slightly, but she blinked the buzz away, giving her head a gentle shake. It would be best, she thought, to see what they wanted. She knew how to defend herself, should it come to that.
They nodded in response to her interrigation.
"May we speak with you for a moment?" Kurama asked. Rose looked at them skeptically for a long moment before nodding and offering entrance into her home, swinging the screen door open. Hiei looked to see the tree in which he had watched the girl from through the large picture window as he stepped into the kitchen.
Flashback
Hiei watched a young woman from the shadows of a thickly branched maple tree, his demonic eyes easily catching her figure. She laughed openly in what looked to be a dinning room with a large picture window in which Hiei looked, but the laughs rang hallow to his sharper-than-human ears. She smiled, but they were pitying smiles, mocking the humans that surrounded her with scorn that was evident to the demon. Her eyes were mysteriously bright, but reflected an unseen smirk, their bottoms hinting they knew an untold story. A story that only she knew, a story she kept with a proud rise to her chin. She knew something unknown to those around her. Unknown to the worlds she had traveled in. Unknown to the all-knowing and powerful. A secret that she wasn't about to tell.
End Flashback
They followed her down a short flight of stairs into what looked like an office. Hiei looked to see a door where an open hall had once graced the entrance to her room. He begged for the room to have had changed. He wouldn't be able to bear seeing it the same, he thought. She opened the door and Hiei's deepest disappointment had come true. The room hadn't changed at all. To his left lay a futon, on which he and Kurama took a seat on, to his right a dark blue room, seemingly split off from the tan room in which they sat in by plastic beads forming stars and crescents.
The fire youkai heard Kurama take a quick breath. He must see the beautiful silver painting on the girl's wall of the large, intrepid dragon. Hiei glanced at its familiar pose as well. The silver creature was still there, rearing up in a noble stance, its bright, icy blue eyes glaring at the unseen opponent. But there was something different about the creature. Around its throat lay a necklace, the necklace Thorn had worn of a black dragon curled around to fit into a circular medallion. Its eyes raged a proud and startling bright green. The same color as Thorn's valiant eyes.
Kurama looked over at Hiei, who glanced at him as well.
What? Hiei asked in his telepathy.
The dragon on the wall. Is it the Black Blaze? the kistune asked.
Yes, I suppose. But now it is bound by the necklace. It was not before, Hiei explained. Kurama did not get to voice his next thought in a message before Rose interrupted by upsetting a vase on her desk as she pulled her chair from it. She caught it easily and held it a moment. She fingered what looked like a withered, dead rose in her hand, then glanced at the bright, flourishing red rose beside its dark, nearly black, mate.
"Something wrong?" Kurama asked as she stared at it a moment, thinking, unmoving but to twirl the plant in her fingers.
"No," she answered blankly. "It looks dead, doesn't it?" She continued to touch the blackish flower. "Yet every time I touch it, I can feel life in it, like its just laying dormant and I can't bring myself to discard it." She gurgled a sound deep in her throat and shook her head roughly, pulling herself from the daze she had sunk into. She put the vase back on the desk beside her computer monitor and continued to remove her chair from the desk and planted it a few feet from a table positioned in front of the futon. She turned to sit curtly in the straight-backed chair, looking at them sternly.
"Can I get you anything?" she asked with a sudden business-like tone, as if she did it merely for seeming polite.
"No thank you," Kurama said. There was just the smallest of pauses.
"Why are you here?" she asked bluntly. It was clear she was not one for beating around the bush. Thorn never was either, though, Hiei mused silently.
"We are here to ask for your assistance," the kitsune said. She expressed a look of hardness before replacing it with a glint of recognition laughing in her eyes. Hiei thought for sure she would burst out in laughter.
So, this again, she thought as silent chuckling rippled through her mind.
"Clearly you were allies with my other self, my evil twin, as they call her. Thorn," she said, snorting, a small smirk tracing the edges of her lips as she looked away, into the darkness of her room, her eyes straying to the dragon on her wall. Hiei stared at her, wide-eyed. She knew about Thorn…?
Kurama graced a slight, hesitant, nod. It was true, yet false as well. No matter, he thought, it was the past now.
"I thought I recognized you," she said. Hiei sat up straighter.
"You remember?" he asked, his voice hinting more hope than he would have liked. She shook her head, her dark eyes still intent upon the lifeless painting.
"No, I remember nothing. I just had this feeling." She looked back at them. "I know, though, by this feeling, that I assisted you at one time." She turned to Hiei. "What is your real name?" Hiei glanced over at Kurama, who nodded.
"My name is Hiei," the youkai said. He jerked his head toward Kurama. "And this is Kurama." She glanced from one to the other and nodded.
"How can I, perhaps, assist you?" she asked. "I am no Thorn, but there might be a way that I can direct you to someone who can help you with your problem."
"We need your help, Rose. We ask for you alliance to help us destroy a destructive power," Kurama said. She shook her head and smirked as if he was a naïve child that didn't understand.
"You are mistaken. I have no power." Kurama made to speak. "Do not argue with me. Many former allies, if you can call them that much, of my other self said that I must still have this power as well, but I don't. I am hollow, like that sword," she said, nodding in gesturing to above their heads. They turned to see the sword that Thorn had carried around on her back. The one that had glowed and buzzed, imprisoning the great power of the legendary dragon: the Black Blaze.
The two looked at it a moment, but it gave no hint that the powerful creature still dwelled within it.
"Apparently, that is where I got my power. As you can see, it is empty. It holds nothing, just like me," Rose said, her mind grim and thoughtful. She didn't know much about this subject, and did not know how much they did either. But perhaps if she answered their questions, they would assist her in recovering her memory. Hiei turned back around. Seeing the sword had reminded him of something. He dug into his pockets, searching for the paper that had been given to him by the girl.
"Maybe you'll recognize this," Hiei said, handing her the worn square of paper. Kurama glanced at him, tearing his gaze away from the empty shell above him. It was no surprise he had kept the crest. The kitsune remembered it vividly. Two roses, one red, one black, intertwining around a nearly invisible, silvery outline of the sword above him, which glowed and pulled its possessor toward the girl when she wanted to be found by them.
Rose took the paper and looked at it. Suddenly, her face lit up just slightly. Hiei leaned forward, hoping, yet dreading what she would say.
"Yes, I've seen something like this before," she said. Hiei's heart leapt. Kurama gave him a glare that suggested that he continue to remain impassive at her words and expressions as the scent of his hope spiked.
Rose stood up and walked into the dark blue room, pushing aside the beads and walking toward a shelf full of notebooks on a tall bookcase, which was built into the dark wall and its paneling painted silver to further accent the dragon and other brushes of silver. She removed one near the end of a middle shelf and quickly flipped through it. She did not seem to find what she was looking for and so replaced it and trailed her fingers down to the fourth to last, which was a very worn and black spiral notebook. She nodded to herself and flipped through this one much more slowly, searching for something. Nearing the end she stopped and glanced from the notebook page to the paper in her hand. She turned around and walked over to the futon, handing Hiei both the notebook and the crest he had handed her.
"Here," she said, pointing to the right page, which held words and some sketches of much the same symbol. And yet, it was different. The outline of the sword was non-existent in the two or three sketches, instead, there was a serpent-like dragon coiling around either the red or the black rose, its mouth gapping as if to consume the blossom. Yet the stems were wrapped around the creature, keeping its hungry jaws at bay.
"I remember that something was supposed to go with it, but I don't remember it, but I do know that the poem goes with it. You are free to read it if you wish. I know what it means, its general picture, but I have the feeling it has a deeper meaning," Rose said. Kurama waited patiently for Hiei to look over the page. "But that was written by my other self," she said before walking back to her chair and sitting down as she waited. She watched Hiei's face intently, trying to decipher emotions under the steel visage he constantly seemed to wear.
The Rose
My wondrous petals,
that's all you see.
You pluck me from my vine,
feel my blackened spines,
and begin to bleed.
You drop me fast,
for another to take.
But maybe you could forget the past,
and learn from your mistake.
Hiei read it quickly, silently. He cursed his ability to recognize her handwriting, although he had only seen it a few times on the few crests she had given the Renkai Tentai. He handed the notebook to Kurama as he pondered over what Thorn had meant by her words, and who it had been meant for.
Kurama handed back the notebook after memorizing the contents on the page. Rose held it on her lap, silent, as she watched them think a moment.
"Tell me, when and where did you get that, Hiei?" Rose asked. Hiei looked up at her.
"Los Vegas, more than a year and a half ago," he said, making sure to keep his voice unreadable. She nodded. It was her turn to ask the questions. She was going to know. To find out what happened in the two years that had passed from her memory.
"Its strange. Most of the very few I've come a crossed had writing on them, as if they were used as business cards, yet yours is blank. Is there a reason?" she asked. Hiei hesitated just slightly, unsure of what to tell the prying girl. Too much information would be dangerous. Should he tell her that her 'other self', that Thorn, had asked him to hunt her so that she could test her powers? Tell her of their understanding and respect for one another? And how it grew to be more than that? No, he thought, he'd just answer her question, nothing more.
"Yes," he said simply. Rose and Kurama both heard the thoughts in his mind, as though their aura had breathed from his mouth to tease them. It told them he was thinking of something, but would not speak of it. It annoyed Rose slightly and her eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly.
"Care to elaborate?" the girl asked with a slight snap.
"It was given to me by Th-I mean, you gave it to me, so I could find you," he said, correcting himself when he began to say Thorn's name. It seemed unwise to speak of her as a real person around her host and creator when they did not think of her as such.
"Hm, I see. So I was correct when I say that I used to be your ally?" she asked.
"Yes," Hiei said, giving a small nod.
"I understand, but, although I was your ally before, I still do not have this power you're talking about. I know that you will argue about this point, but it is the truth," she said. Kurama opened his mouth to protest. "But don't argue. I don't know why you are so eager to argue with me, but whatever you knew about me as 'Thorn', forget. That side of me is gone. I'll never let it happen again," she said sternly.
"Why is that?" Kurama asked in a soft voice. She hardened her dark green eyes as she looked at him.
"Because I don't like waking up one morning to find my life turned upside down, Kurama," she said with a slight growl mingling in her voice, testing the name she had been given and deciding she liked it much better than Shuichi. "Half my family and most everything I cared about, was dead when I woke up. Do you have any idea how much of a slap in the face that was?" she asked angrily. She struggled to keep herself under control as her temper began to flare with silver sparks. "My life is gone. It was replaced by the life of my other self. A very lonely life. But now, this Thorn is dead, never to return," she said. A spark of anger brightened Hiei's eyes. She had no clue. She did not know what Thorn had sacrifice just to let her live, not to mention what she had given up to try to keep the girl's family alive from the treacherous jaws of that brutal fiend, the Black Blaze. It nearly pissed him off. Almost, but not quite. She did have a point, and being without her memories only worsened her plight. But it also hurt him. She was not alone, at least, not for the time he had known and stalked her. Rose seemed so sure Thorn would not return. And what if she was right? Hiei mentally hit himself. No, he vowed he would find her again, and there's nothing that anyone could do to stop him from getting her back.
"Rose, please, hear me out," Kurama said, encouragement and a slight plea in his tone. "There are these worlds, including the human world, that are in danger of being destroyed. We need your help to save the people who live in those worlds." She shook her head.
"Let me guess, you're talking about Spirit World and the Demon world?" she said with an amused snort. "Yes, I've heard of them, no need to look shocked. Apparently, from what information I have gathered, although it is rare and slim, I've been to both."
"If you have no memory of your past, then how do you know of them?" Hiei asked.
"I don't really know for certain. I just feel that I know when they are mentioned," she said quietly. She stood up and walked over to the bookshelf, replacing the notebook to its proper place. She turned back to the boys and stood next to her chair, her thumbs slung through her belt loops located on the back of her jeans. Her expression was devoid of emotion as her dark eyes looked at them. Taking her hint, Kurama stood to leave. Hiei glanced up at him and followed suit. She had decided that she had had enough of their questions.
"Its getting late," Kurama said. "We should be going." She nodded and moved to lead them upstairs.
She opened the front door for them when they reached the kitchen and they stepped out onto the porch before turning back toward her.
"Thank you again for your time, Rose," Kurama said. "Perhaps we will see you tomorrow?"
"Don't bother putting yourself through hell just to watch me, trying to persuade me to believe that I have something that doesn't exist, Kurama. It would be pointless," the girl said. Kurama nodded in understanding. It didn't matter, he had a different plan formulating in his mind and it did not, necessarily, require them to follow her in school. And he had a feeling that her school days were much the same as it had been that day anyway.
"Have a nice day then," the kitsune said, giving a small bow before turning away as she nodded. Hiei looked at the girl grimly as he turned slightly to follow his partner.
I promise you, I will be back, he told her silently, using the expert powers of his Jagan eye. She looked at him, her expression hardening as she tilted her head in a nod of good-bye.
And I assure you that I am not the same person, nor will I ever be again, so I suggest that you leave and forget, she said back to him as he turned away, walking behind Kurama. He paused just a second, surprised that she could or did reply. He grunted and continued on.
Authoress' Note: yay! Another chapter completed! Ya'll rock! I've been meaning to get this chapter up for a good long while, but I've been both lazy and erm… lazy? anyway, my muse made me even edit the NEXT chapter, so the faster the revs pump in for this one, the sooner I can put them on that chappy and dish that one out!
Reviews
Ensatsu-Kokoryu-Ha:
Yes, poor Hiei-kun. I'm going to really torture him in this story. I guess I like doing that, since I've done it in 'A Failed Protector' and 'Hiei and Chocolate' o. yes, it would be waaayy too dangerous, which is why its not suggested. Not to mention the point that the BB cannot be awakened unless THORN was awakened first, and since no one knows the secret that wakes her, then its not happening. Anyway, I've edited the next few chapters with more of Rose's POV. I don't know why I don't like getting into my Original Character's head a lot. -shrug- I guess its because we're not really supposed to be looking through their eyes. It shows how little we know about them if we don't know what they're thinking. Of course, my side story is ALL of her POV. But that wont be out for a while yet I'm thinking… anyway, This chapter it was really hard to fit in POV without making it look screwy, so there ya go! Lovin' the long revs! Thanks!
miyako14:
Thank you! yes, must torture him more!!! -gets out magic wooden spoon- ooohhh Hiei-Kun! -evil grin- yes, stupid-ass cheerleaders. Cassidy plays a pretty big role in the side story, so be fore warned! I'm so bad, giving out so many spoilers to it! Erk! Here's yer update! Thanks!
baka-chibi-puffs:
Muse: -chokes- gaaa!
J: ermmm I think he died… VV darn. O.O here here! An update! -shoves update down her throat- happy now? Lovin' da cake girl!
J: is it just me or is my popularity going like… WAYY down? I remember when I got 6 revs a chapter! -shrug- oh well. This is for you few and faithful!
J