In the Wake of What Follows
Chapter Seventeen: A Day Off
"You look like shit," Shizuru said as greeting. "Been drinking again?"
Terra groaned and tried to hide her eyes from the fluorescent lights, her sunglasses not doing a good enough job. Yukina placed a cooling touch at Terra's temple and relieved some of the pain. It had been an ongoing process all day.
"Hiei-san has begun training Terra on strengthening the barrier around her mind," Yukina explained.
After two months, Terra finally agreed to come down to the city with Yukina to get groceries. The break was more than welcome after the torment Hiei was putting her through. Shizuru pulled her inside with a friendly hand on the shoulder. The gentle jostle was enough to set Terra's head spinning. She groaned again and welcomed the chair Shizuru lead her to.
"Sounds like you might actually need a drink," Shizuru laughed. "Sit still and I'll grab you a hot towel for your face. I'll give you a beer once I'm done."
"Can you turn off the lights?" Terra mumbled.
Shizuru snorted before the sound of water rushed from a faucet. "Only if you want this to be a really interesting haircut." She came back with the promised hot towel. It was a comforting weight against Terra's face, relaxing some of the strain in her eyes. Shizuru's fingers carded through Terra's hair. It was turning into a mullet; the impromptu pixie cut growing out in the worst way. "Do you want to fix your roots? They're a whole thumb's length now."
Terra grumbled something unintelligible. Yukina laughed into her palm to mask the sound.
"I'll take that as a go-ahead," Shizuru said.
The heat of the towel and the darkness it afforded her eyes helped Terra relax as Shizuru began to shampoo her hair. When Terra had begun lessons on fortifying her mental barrier, she hadn't realized what she was getting into. It wasn't the natural burn of muscle she was used to from years of dance, nor the way she learned to manipulate the strange and somewhat elusive energy inside her. Guarding her mind against psychics was like bashing her head in with a hammer.
The first struggle was learning to knowingly activate the barrier that had once been a defensive reflex. When Terra had come to the temple, she was so guarded. Walls upon walls upon walls. She would never have imagined it carried over to her psychic abilities. She wondered when those walls began to fail. If Hiei could get into her mind, then maybe her stay at the temple was doing exactly what she needed. It was a sign she was healing.
She would have traded healing for the ability to avoid this particular headache.
When they first sat down across from each other, Terra hadn't known what to expect. "Close your eyes and concentrate" wasn't much of a directive.
"Concentrate on what?" Terra had asked.
"Anything," Hiei said. "Anything strong enough to create a wall with. Some visualize a door to lock or tall wall. Others may use sayings in repetition, a barrier of language that the mind reader may get trapped in, unable to reach your true thoughts."
"Or a song?" Terra asked. "Like the way a tune gets stuck in your head and you find yourself singing it even as you're thinking something else?"
Hiei gave her an unimpressed look. "Don't start singing."
"But it could work," she pressed. Genkai had taught Terra how to clear her mind in order to tap into the energy coursing in her veins. Still, somehow, she had carried a barrier around it. A weak one, but a barrier nonetheless. The weight of tragedy had set her in herself like a nesting doll, but that wasn't a defense she could rely on. A song, though. Nothing could be a mantra to circle around her thoughts like a song.
Hiei didn't say anything. His blank stare spoke strongly enough. Terra sighed and tried to let her muscles relax. "Okay," she said. "How do I know if it's working."
"I won't be able to get into your mind," Hiei said, as if she were being obtuse on purpose.
Terra narrowed her eyes, searching the burn of his coal-hot glare. "Are you in my mind now?"
The corner of Hiei's mouth ticked up. It made Terra's stomach flip in the most unsettling way. "Perhaps."
Terra clenched her teeth together. Any ability to concentrate had flown out the window. Her mind wasn't blank, but it sure as hell wasn't in her control. Her thoughts swung around wildly like a zoo where all the animals had been let loose.
"Stop that," Hiei snarled, his playful smirk a forgotten mirage. "Concentrate."
"How can I know if I'm doing it if I can't even tell you're digging up in here," she snapped.
"I'm not digging. You're not worth the effort," he scoffed.
That ticked her off. Not worth the effort. Yet she was sure he could hear how annoyed she was. There was a superior smugness creeping back into his features. "Okay, but how will I know if I'm getting anywhere if I can't tell you're in my brain space," she said with an exaggerated shiver. It was creepy.
Then she heard it. It wasn't quite Hiei's voice. More like her memory of it, how she may sometimes imagine him speaking, a muted sound that graced across that void of space where thoughts lie in the brain. It almost sounded real. Almost like she was hearing it. It would be so easy to think that, if she didn't know better. Still, Terra nearly jumped out of her skin as Hiei spoke in her mind. 'Block me out.'
She wondered if this is what an auditory hallucination felt like.
'You're not hallucinating.'
"I know," she breathed. "Feels like I'm going crazy, though."
"Concentrate."
Terra tried. Her nerves about Hiei reading her mind was settled only because she was now unnerved by the foreign sensation of someone else's thoughts in her consciousness. Then an even more disturbing notion hit her.
"I still can't tell you're there," Terra said, picking at the fabric of her leggings as she wrangled her thoughts together. "When I was making a barrier before, the resistance was enough to alert me, even though I didn't realize it at the time." Hiei heard the rest of the argument before she had a chance to voice it.
"What do you wish me to talk about?" Hiei huffed, already resigned to the unfavorable inevitability.
'You're going to let me pick?' she asked, wondering if he would hear that.
Hiei snorted. She took that as a sign her thoughts were loud enough. 'Might as well. I wouldn't know what to speak of anyway.'
'Tell me about the Makai,' she asked. The first thing to pop into her head.
And so he did. Terra hadn't expected Hiei to be talkative, even when her training might have counted on it. She was surprised when his voice continued to grace the shallows of her consciousness. Hiei described all the places he traveled. The way the air smelled like blood and the sky was dark with colors, nothing like those seen in the human world. He spoke of Alaric and the moving, living castle he once lived in. He spoke so much of so many things that Hiei had to yell at her to concentrate. She had forgotten the reason for their conversation.
'Well maybe try to be less interesting,' she mock scolded as she tried to build up her barrier again.
The next time they trained, Hiei told her of all of his kills. In detail. He claimed it was so it wouldn't be too interesting for her, but rather something Terra would want to block out. Sometimes brief flashes of images would slip through, beyond just the words he thought. Hiei was right. She didn't want to know this.
If the pain from Hiei gently prodding her weak reflex barriers had felt like budding migraines, the way he pressed upon her slowly growing defenses was enough to bring her to tears some nights. When Hiei had given her the day off to help Yukina with the groceries, she jumped at the chance despite her earlier avoidance of the chore.
Her headache lessened as Shizuru massaged her scalp, the hot towel slowly cooling on her face. By the time Shizuru had set the dye and washed it out and began to cut, Terra almost felt like a functioning human again.
"Is the training at least working?" Shizuru asked once Terra finally started talking.
Terra shrugged. "Yes and no. I can block him out, but I can feel the pressure of his mind lightly checking the strength of my barrier. If he, or any mind reader for that matter, really wanted to," Terra shrugged. "They'd be able to break through pretty easily. I have to struggle through migraines until I'm strong enough that breaking the barrier would be a challenge on his end. And I have no idea how long that will take."
"Well, here then." Something cold touched Terra's temples, but it wasn't Yukina's soothing hands. Terra reached up and took the chilled beer can from Shizuru. "You sound like you deserve it."
"Cheers," Terra said, cracking it open as Shizuru went back to shaping her hair.
A few hours and a few beers later, Terra and Yukina parted ways with Shizuru to finally get the groceries needed for the next few weeks. When Terra had been presented with the idea of going down to town, she hadn't really been thinking of the errands they were actually sent to do. After the breakfast Yukina made them, Kuwabara hadn't been sure they should leave without him. To be fair, Terra probably looked like she'd just crawled out of her own grave.
"Are you sure you don't want me to come with?" Kuwabara had pressed. "The grocery run is going to be heavy."
Yukina smiled brightly. "Yes, I know. Terra will be fine by the time we come back."
"Didn't realize I would be the pack-mule," she grumbled into her arm, head rested on the table. They usually bought groceries for the whole month. Feeding just Kuwabara could be upwards of twenty kilos.
"Oh, don't worry too much, we have a cart we use to bring everything up the stairs, and Keiko will drive us," Yukina told her.
"It's fine," Terra said. "Gotta get my training in somehow."
Keiko picked them up from Shizuru's salon, driving a beat-up old hunk that Terra was surprised could still run.
"Do you cart Tomio around in this?" Terra asked as she buckled her seatbelt. It didn't seem safe for them, let alone a baby.
"Yusuke is using the minivan," Keiko supplied with a warm smile. "It's his turn to bring Tomio to a playdate. Otherwise, I'd be using it today."
It was easy to fall into line with the girls. Situational friends, that's what Terra was good at. People you got to know and hang out with only because you were in the same location. Girls from ballet or classmates you thought would be useful in a group project, or your group for school trips. It was easy to slip into a friend group, like drinking it up with all the guys at Kuwabara's wedding. Terra had one good friend in high school, and then became inseparable from Conner and Jeremy. She liked Yukina and Keiko well enough, but she wondered when the shift happened. As Keiko fumed like the righteous mother she was and Yukina laughed like you'd expect a fairy to sound like, Terra felt settled with them. Were these girls real friends?
Were any of those she had met at the temple?
Despite the environment - the bustling crowds Terra was no longer comfortable around and the loud noises of the city that grated at Terra's nerves - Terra was happy to be around Keiko and Yukina. There was a novel triviality about shopping that didn't seem so overwhelming as the last time Terra had ventured down the mountain. She was sure it was due to her companionship this time around.
"Oh, can we stop here before we make it to the market," Keiko pleaded apologetically. "I drank too much peach-tea and now I need to pee. Besides, it's cute."
Before waiting for a response, Keiko darted into a cafe. It was frilly and there were many plushies in the window. Cute indeed, if not Terra's personal taste. It was clear they were a specialty store, selling novelty items in the shape of popular cute characters. A lot of the cookies for sale were designed to look like Pokemon.
It was sanctioned, too. There was even a sticker in on the display case advertising a new game that was going to come out. Terra's family used to receive preview copies of items like that. Ryunouske's shareholder status in the company was so large and so old that they were often sent thank-you packages for their loyalty to the company. His son, Terra's grandfather, had even served on the Board of Trustees for some time, if her memory served correctly.
Family history never explained where Ryunouske earned his fortune in order to invest it in the first place, only that he had thrived after backing what became one of the world's largest companies.
"Oh!" Yukina smiled a bit sadly. "I believe Genkai had this game. I don't know if she ever got the chance to play it."
Genkai did have a lot of games. Terra hadn't looked them all over. It was entirely possible that Genkai's fortune flowed from the same well. It was plausible both Genkai and Ryunouske took money as their reward for winning the Dark Tournament so many years ago and invested in the same company.
Why the same company, though? Investing that much into the same basket almost guaranteed a binding relationship. From Rizu's account, none of them were exactly friends. Although, Terra wasn't sure how much she trusted the wani's words. Besides, Terra was making too many conclusions based on pure speculation. She'd have to look more into the whole matter to even discover if Genkai was a shareholder in Nintendo, or if they invested at the same time, or if the money they put up was indeed from the Dark Tournament.
Terra recalled the photo of Genkai's team and the human Rizu. Hiei hadn't been very forthcoming, and she hadn't the chance to ask any of the others about it. She could only piece together from Yusuke's wild stories what the Dark Tournament was actually like, and what kind of prizes they could truthfully give.
Rizu had been human. It was something that caught at her brain as she stared at the Totodile cookie. What had happened?
"Terra?"
Terra startled back to reality. Yukina was frowning, an unsettling feature on the girl's face. She had probably called Terra a few times.
"Did you want to get something?" she asked, a sweet smile masking her worry. "Those cookies are so cute."
"Uh. Oh, yeah. Sure," Terra replied in a bit of a daze.
They made an order while waiting for Keiko, grabbing an extra cookie for her. Terra didn't touch hers much as they made their way through the market. She wasn't hungry, and Pikachu's chubby cheeks dredged up too many memories of her childhood. They weren't bad memories, but she had a hard time remembering her father without also remembering how he looked upside down in a burning car. Terra had been sitting behind her mother, so she hadn't been able to see her as well as her father in the driver's seat. She accidentally held the artisan cookie too hard and it broke in her hand, bits of crumbs and frosting falling to the ground.
It shocked her out of her reverie. Terra quickly located a trash bin and tossed what had remained in her hand. It had been a long time since something set her off about her parents. Other than her nightmares of the crash itself. Even those were less frequent nowadays. Her nightmares were full of demons now.
It had been so surprising to be struck with such an intense flashback that Terra forgot what led her down that train of thought. She focused back on Keiko and Yukina. They hadn't seemed to notice her lapse in attention, happily chattering. Terra joined in to cover, not wanting to seem silent for too long. Yukina was already worried about her behavior today.
Grocery shopping for the temple was an endeavor. Blearily accepting the request to come that morning, she hadn't been able to comprehend why Kuwabara asked three times to make sure he wasn't needed. They were buying a full month's worth of food, and Kuwabara ate a lot. Plus, they often had unexpected guests. Keiko's car would be a big help getting everything back to the temple, but Terra wasn't missing out on training today knowing that she would be the one to carry about thirty kilos worth of food up all the steps.
"This has been so much fun!" Keiko cheered as they got everything into the trunk of her car. "You should come down with Yukina next month, too!"
Terra smiled. "Depends on what my training looks like," she said, not willing to promise anything. Hanging out with the girls had been fun, but Terra didn't feel comfortable in the city anymore. It was as if, now that her eyes had been opened to the world of magic and demons, the mundane world of humans felt foreign. She didn't know how Keiko and Shizuru did it.
She'd isolated herself from the outside world for so long, first in her apartment and now at the temple, Terra knew integrating back into the real world was going to be difficult. She had two months left of training, but the end was coming. Terra realized she wasn't ready.
Keiko was nice, though. Maybe Terra would move close to where she and Yusuke lived. She watched the world pass by as they drove back to the temple. Or maybe Japan was too full of memories of things she needed to move on from.
But maybe she was just running from her problems and not looking for real solutions.
Either way, she couldn't think about that now. Terra knew what kind of dark spiral that line of thinking would bring her.
"Don't be a stranger," Keiko said after dropping them off. "And feel free to come visit for more than just groceries!"
Terra wondered if Keiko was lonely, or if she made a lot of friends being a mom. At the very least, she and Shizuru had each other down in the city.
"I may come down next weekend," Yukina said with a smile and a hug for her good friend. "Kazuma and I are going to start to get the word out about opening the temple to students, but we need to do some more research first."
"Oh! That's exciting. Let me know if you need help!"
The pair said some final parting words, Terra throwing in her own goodbye before Keiko climbed back into her car and drove off.
"You seem distracted today," Yukina said as they began their trek up the mountain.
Terra sighed. "Why did you and Kuwabara decide to take residence in the temple instead of staying in the city?"
Yukina looked forward, up at the dimming rays of sunlight through the tree branches. She smiled as a bird flew past. "I love this world," she told Terra. "I love the people I've met and the places I've seen. I love going into town. But, I think, at heart, I am someone who thrives best in simplicity." She looked back over to Terra. "I suppose we could have settled in the countryside, a simple train ride away from the others, but the space was available to us, and Genkai needed support. But more than for me, this was best for Kazuma."
"How do you mean?"
It was a few more steps before Yukina responded. "He was doing so well in school. Kazuma is very smart. And he had dreams, ones I quite admired, to be a scientist. But, Kazuma is also very powerful." Her soft smile faded at this. "His psychic ability is truthfully the strongest of any human alive. I don't think even he realizes this, but Koenma has told me. It's hard for him, among so many people. I love this world, but it is chaotic in a wholly different way than demon world. Those in demon world are attuned with the energies around them. Almost as if we share the burden of the world with the world and each other. It flows through all of us. Here, humans are so closed off that those sensitive to the spiritual are often forced to handle more than they are capable of.
"For Kazuma, he feels so deeply, so strongly, so much more than you or his friends or even Genkai... The temple is the best place where Kazuma can be attuned to the energies this world gives off without it overwhelming him."
Terra nodded. She thinks she understood. "It's been hard," she admitted, "going back into the city. I thought it was just because I had been isolated for so long. But maybe it's because I've opened my powers."
Yukina nodded. "It's quite possible." She looked Terra over and smiled again, lighting up her face. "Genkai was right to invite you to join us. It has been so exciting to watch you grow since your first time here."
Terra scrunched her nose up in response, knocking her glasses against her bangs. It was awkward to be praised for her actions at the temple. It didn't feel like she was doing anything exciting or noteworthy.
"Do you believe in Genkai's notion of providence?" Terra asked.
"It's hard to say," Yukina admitted. "Perhaps. As big as the three worlds are, lives cross in the strangest of ways."
Terra remembered that despite all his searching, Hiei couldn't find his sister until he was arrested by the Reikai. If he had been successful in his crimes, or snuck away without capture, they might still have not found each other.
"If you're worrying about why Master Genkai invited you here," Yukina continued, "please know it was for your own merit. I don't believe even she could have known of your relation to her former teammate last summer before asking you back."
Terra nodded. She was at the temple so briefly that first time, there was no way. Regardless, it gave her a million questions. "I guess I'm more curious as to who my great-grandfather was more than anything." And why Genkai would share this with Hiei but not herself.
That could be her next project. Something to look forward to when she finally had to leave the temple. A puzzle to put together. A journey to keep her occupied. It wasn't a perfect plan, but it was something.
As the final rays of daylight hid beyond the horizon, Terra and Yukina crested the top of the mountain stairway. The temple had a welcoming presence under the moonlight. It would be difficult, when the time came, to say goodbye.