Chapter Eleven

While Hiei and Kurama were battling each other, Yusuke was walking farther away from the cave than he knew he ought to get, moving randomly and quickly, full of adrenaline and nothing to use it for. He had been certain, when he spoke to them and then left them together, that he was doing the right thing. But with time and distance, doubt was creeping up on him.

The only thing that he could imagine being stronger than either Hiei or Kurama's discipline was their emotional response to each other. So could he really trust them alone together, provoked like he had provoked them? Was it possible--could they actually get so angry that they could do serious harm to each other? Kill each other?

No--the two of them had agreed to work together, until he could defeat them; they had all agreed to that contract. They wouldn't hurt each other...

He guessed.

But even fearing things would go badly, the one thing he knew for sure was that it would be worse if he went back. He'd managed to push them into confronting each other after a decade of hateful silence--now there was no way to stop that confrontation. If he got in the middle of it he would only distort it, make it about him so no good could come of it. There was no stopping it now.

And with that realization came depression, smothering the restless energy that had propelled him forward until he didn't know where he was. Yusuke slowed, then came to a stop. He sat down on a rock and put his chin in his hands.

He could feel her watching.

It was one of the reasons he had started taking snow in the first place. The memories; the guilt; the questions. And the sense, over his shoulder, of Keiko's ghost sometimes following him, staring at him.

Before, he could have smothered the feeling of her there. Now, without anything to distract him, it sent him spiraling deep into his memories.

Keiko--telling him she was getting a kitten whether he liked it or not, and if he kicked it he would be sleeping on the couch. Him grumbling that he didn't need to kick it, he would just blast its head off with his index finger if it got under his feet. Her thinking he was serious.

Keiko, calmly setting the apartment to rights after several demons had trooped in without notice, started to tell Yusuke about a problem in Raizen's old territory, gotten into a fight amongst themselves, broken the coffee table, and scared the kitten under the sofa before being tossed out. Stopping Yusuke when he tried to apologize; telling him that she understood.

Keiko, telling him that they ought to paint the room yellow because that was a color for either a girl or a boy and she didn't want to know which it was. Yusuke arguing that green was better. Keiko crossing her arms in front of her. Their biggest fights were always over ridiculous things like this, and when Yusuke saw her foot start tapping, he realized he'd better go get some yellow paint.

"Yusuke."

Yusuke was so wrapped up in reviewing every moment, every detail, that he didn't realize his name had been spoken out loud at first. It could so easily have been part of the memories. But then the person spoke again, with more urgency. "Yusuke. Hold still."

"Huh?" Yusuke blinked, tried to focus on the person in front of him.

"Hold still," Kurama repeated. His expression was serious and his eyes were not quite on Yusuke; even more telling, he was standing slightly on the balls of his feet, ready to move. Yusuke took all that in, and froze.

He was more than halfway expecting there to be someone sneaking up behind him--but it seemed to be Kurama himself who was doing the sneaking, moving slowly and silently closer while a baffled Yusuke remained frozen. Until suddenly there was a tussle of vegetation and his arm started to hurt, and then he just had to look no matter what Kurama said. There was a vine with nasty looking tentacle-sucker-thingies fighting with what looked like Kurama's whip, except Kurama wasn't holding the other end. The fight was pretty brief--the vine, oozing unpleasant gunk, retreated into the greenery with a surprisingly audible hiss, leaving sucker marks behind it all over Yusuke's arm.

Kurama bent down to retrieve the whip, which was now a rose, as calmly as though independent quarrels amongst vegetation were normal. "Did you think that all the predators in Makai were animals?" he asked.

Yusuke examined his arm. It stung slightly. "What was that thing?"

"Not something that usually troubles people, I can tell you that much. What were you thinking letting it latch onto you like that? It's a very slow mover--you can't have been paying any attention. It usually feeds on dead bodies."

Great. Now I really feel like a walking corpse. "Kurama?" Yusuke asked as he stood.

"Yes?" Kurama replied, gesturing that they should start walking back to the cave.

Yusuke fell in next to him. "Can I ask you a really personal question?"

Kurama looked at him with surprise. It couldn't have been any less than Yusuke's own surprise--he had had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth until he'd already said it. But he knew exactly what the question was. Something he'd wanted to know since Keiko died, something he'd never thought he'd be brave enough to ask Kurama. But suddenly it didn't seem to matter--not with the way today had been going, not with the mood Kurama had caught him in.

Kurama nodded, but his expression was wary. "You can ask anything. I don't promise to answer."

Yusuke cleared his throat, looking for the right wording. He knew he was about to tread onto seriously dangerous ground. "When you--when you were, uh, reborn. When you got your human body. Was--was there a soul inside it already?"

Kurama looked blindsided. Yusuke couldn't blame him--he'd undoubtedly been preparing himself for a question about Hiei. They walked in silence for a long moment and Yusuke could almost see a visible effort taking place to switch gears, to move from one emotional battleground to another--coupled with a faint look of incredulity. Probably wondering how many of his old wounds I'm going to take a swing at today. "Yes," Kurama finally replied, simply.

"What happened to the soul?"

Kurama gave a slow, uneasy shrug. "It went away. For a long time I thought that it returned to Spirit World unborn. I still believe that most of the time. But there are moments when I wonder if I carry part of it in me." He opened his mouth as if he would say more, but didn't.

Heedless of what the sudden stop might mean, Yusuke pressed on. "But how far along was the pregnancy?"

Kurama looked blindsided again. "Does it matter?"

"I just--" I just want to know when a soul enters a body, when it becomes a person, when it can die. But Yusuke knew that was a debate that had been fiercely contested for a long time by a lot of people, and he wasn't likely to get the answers here. "I mean, if the soul left, then it--it went back to Spirit World, you said, but is that it? Does it get to go into some other body and be born and live and everything, or what? Or is that it? Is it like it died even though it never got to be born and that's all it gets, just the afterlife? Does it get another chance?"

Yusuke forced himself to stop--and an uncomfortably long silence followed. Kurama's eyes, which had started to turn inward before, were now focused sharply on him. Yusuke looked away. He wondered how pissed Kurama was--the topic of the "real" Shuichi was forbidden and Yusuke knew it. He also knew he was getting away with it only because he was in the process of recovering.

But Kurama's answer, when it came, held no anger. Just sadness. "I wish I knew, Yusuke." Somehow, he managed to make those words sound sincere, not just a token answer. "I really wish I could tell you."

Yusuke kicked a stone out of their path and watched it skitter away. He should have known Kurama wouldn't have the answer. But even the slightest chance--

"Have you asked Koenma?"

Yusuke glanced at him. "Asked Koenma..."

"What happened to it."

And just like that, the conversation jumped from a hypothetical one about Kurama to a very real one about Yusuke. Kurama met Yusuke's sudden stare calmly. Yusuke felt like hyperventilating. He knew--he knew, he'd figured it out just from Yusuke asking, he was the only person that had ever known...they hadn't told anybody before, and then after... "Did you talk to Koenma after she died?" Kurama prompted.

Yusuke gained a sudden appreciation for how hard it must have been for Kurama to answer his questions before; how hard it was to construct a level voice around words that burned. "Once. I asked him to bring her back. He said no. We haven't spoken since."

"You should ask him. Knowing will make it easier on you."

"But--what if it's dead?"

Yusuke couldn't believe he'd said the words out loud. He never had. But Kurama took it in stride, only glancing at him and then saying contemplatively, "My mother used to say that babies or little children who died were souls too perfect to need to live. She also used to say that it probably wasn't much comfort to the parents. But I don't think it matters--I don't think someone who's never been born can die. I think your child's alive somewhere. And I think even if I'm wrong, you'd be better off knowing."

Yusuke's breath caught in his chest on the words your child and alive somewhere. His arm actually tensed up to hit Kurama--he would have hit him in the past, but now he just stayed tense for a moment and then relaxed. "Maybe," Yusuke admitted. Then, stalling, he added, "But I bet Koenma wouldn't even want to talk to me. I sent a lot of people his way when I was... sick."

"He came by the cave a few days ago while you and Hiei were gone and asked if he could do anything to help you."

Yusuke looked up sharply. "What?"

"I'm certain he'll talk to you."

"If he wants to help me, why didn't he just stay?"

Kurama's jaw tightened. "Hiei." Yusuke looked at him blankly, so he elaborated. "Hiei and Koenma are not on speaking terms."

By speaking terms, Yusuke understood that Kurama meant somebody would die, and it wouldn't be Hiei. "Why didn't you tell me he was there?"

"Koenma and I are not on speaking terms, either."

Yusuke studied him, and Kurama pretended to be unaware of it--or uncaring, because he faced straight forward. "So he's involved in this fight of yours," Yusuke said, even though that was pretty obvious, just to see Kurama's response.

"To a degree." Kurama's tone was clipped, intended to tell Yusuke to drop the subject, but Yusuke had no intention of doing so. Aside from being a distraction from his own pain, it was the closest he'd gotten to learning something about their fight and he wasn't about to stop pressing right now.

"What kind of degree?"

"Ask him."

"...So you and Hiei hashed it out?"

Kurama only raised his eyebrows and gave him a mildly incredulous look, but Yusuke took the point well enough: it would take a lot longer than one afternoon to accomplish that. "Okay, fine. But you can tell me what it's about now, can't you?" Kurama's eyebrows went a little higher. "No one ever really knew."

"That was deliberate."

"Come on. It's been forever. You can at least tell me. I mean, I'm the one who forced you into talking about it in the first place."

Kurama seemed to consider this for a moment. When he spoke, his tone was void of emotion. "I did something Hiei did not like. So he allowed me to believe he had done something I did not like. We argued. We failed to come to an agreement."

It took Yusuke a long, long moment of silence to realize that Kurama was done. "...That's all I get?!"

"That's all you get."

"That was as bad as nothing!"

"And yet, I answered your question. As a token of gratitude for forcing us to talking about it in the first place, as you pointed out."

Yusuke shut up. He'd known Kurama long enough to recognize the tone of voice he'd just used as a red flag that his patience was gone. They walked in subdued silence for another twenty minutes or so before Yusuke realized they were close to the cave. Then Yusuke spoke up, awkwardly." Kurama--look, you won't--"

"Tell anybody?" Kurama shook his head. "No. I think that you should. But I won't break your confidence. I'm honored by it."

Yusuke didn't know what to say to that. They reached the cave, and both hesitated at the entrance. Yusuke shuffled his feet, looked at the forest. "Look, I'd kind of like to... be alone for awhile," he muttered.

There was a moment of silence. Then Kurama spoke very quietly. "I'm sorry. I can't go in there."

"...Oh. Right." Yusuke briefly considered his options--hang out in the clearing with Kurama, go into a cave no doubt containing a pissed off fire demon, or head back out into the forest for more encounters with things he was too weak or stupid to protect himself from. In the end he decided in favor of the cave, figuring he'd provoked Kurama too much to make staying with him a good idea. Besides, if Hiei turned out to be murderous Yusuke could always change his mind.

But he still hesitated--and then, because he had already provoked Kurama and if the fox was going to be angry he might as well get it all over with now, Yusuke spoke in a rush. It was hard to get his mouth to work, and he knew if his earlier words had been treading on dangerous ground then these were running onto it at full speed. But he couldn't stop himself. "You know, Kurama, if she--if Keiko--if she was alive. I don't think there's an argument in the world that could be so important it would keep me away from her."

He was amazed that he got it out. Even though he'd stammered, he'd managed to say her name, and had to guts to imply that Hiei and Kurama--

Kurama didn't turn to hear him speak, or to reply. He showed virtually no reaction, in fact; his reply was spoken without emotion. "You only think that because she's not alive."

Yusuke stared at him, but Kurama continued to show no sign of being aware of him. After a few moments Yusuke turned and shuffled into the cave.

Hiei was curled up towards the back, his cloak over his face--not asleep, but nonetheless giving them both an easy way to pretend that he was. So Yusuke also curled up and pretended to be asleep, even though hours passed before he finally was--hours he passed feverishly caught up in memories, not daring to move, scarcely daring to breathe, at once terrified to get lost in them and terrified to depart from them.