AN: Okay, home stretch! Penultimate chapter. Dedication and disclaimer in prologue.

Chapter Seven

"The Woodsman, he cuts open the wolf's stomach, the girl comes out without a scratch... There ain't no fucking woodsman in this world."

- Lucas, The Woodsman

"He actually asked to be rescued in so many words?" Koenma hedged.

Yusuke smacked the toddler's desk. "Yes! No. But he made it perfectly clear what he wasn't saying! Anyway, it's not rescuing. It's lending a helping hand to a friend who's having relationship issues."

Koenma sucked on his pacifier, reflecting, and shook his head. "You've lost me."

The ogre guy, who was going through papers at the other end of the desk and looking very intelligent for someone who was blue and wearing a loincloth made out of some kind of deceased cat, said, "It's finding the least costly way to salvage the usefulness of a valuable employee, sir."

"Oh." Koenma nodded. "That makes sense."

From the midst of the gang gathered behind Yusuke, Kuwabara asked, "So we've gotta get inside Kurama's head?"

"Without his knowing it, so that Karasu won't have time to stop us," Botan confirmed gravely. "It's going to be very dangerous, even if we do find a way to make it all work in the first place."

"Yeah," Kuwabara said, "but… inside Kurama's head? I bet there are alphabetized boxes of torture techniques under a big sign that says 'training'." He shuddered.

Hiei snorted his extreme contempt.

Kuwabara jumped theatrically and looked around. "Hey, did someone hear something from the floor?"

"You'll have even more trouble processing sound when I rip your ears from your head," Hiei snarled.

"Yukina would heal me," Kuwabara said confidently. "Anyway, we're in the boss's office, and you can't do that kind of thing in here. It's disrespectful."

"Oh-KAY, boys, shut it," Yusuke snapped. "Mommy and Daddy are talking. So kid," as he turned back to Koenma, "what've you got? And keep in mind, if you repeat what you told Botan, I'm gonna ask you politely, the first time, not to lie to me."

"Well," Koenma said carefully, "there might be a way, if it had a snowball's chance in hell of working. Which, unfortunately, it doesn't. It includes putting a volatile monster in the hands of a volatile teenager and trusting them both to destroy a volatile demon while trespassing in Lord Morpheus's realm."

"Uh-huh." Yusuke shrugged. "Lemme ask you - you more worried about this Morphine guy, who is not here, or me and my army?"

Botan stepped up, patting Yusuke's shoulder, "Please, Yusuke, don't threaten your employer."

"Employer like hell, I don't get paid," Yusuke muttered, but he let her take the floor with her friendliest grin.

"Koenma, sir, do you think your father might be a little upset if you lost a mascot like the Legendary Youko Kurama?"

Koenma gulped, and looked shifty. "It's just… Lord Morpheus is… and no one wants a lifetime of nightmares…"
"You think?" Yusuke spat.

Koenma visibly strained, and looked at things from a point other than his own. "Ah. I see what you mean. Yes, you make an excellent point. How could we call ourselves men -" he looked around and amended, "how could we call ourselves gods, ferry girls, demons, properly respectful young men, and self-indulgent spirit detectives if we failed to rise to the occasion?" St. Crispin's Day Speech done, he settled back in his chair. "Botan, take care of it. Ogre, help her."

"Go to sleep now
Little ugly
Go to sleep now
You little fool…"

I was lying under the bed, looking into the mirror that leaning against the wall. I was alone, and it took several moments to sink in. In the mirror, a pale, naked, obese woman with an underslung jaw dragged a hook down her face.

I scrambled out and stood, looking around again. "Karasu?"

The woods had no underbrush left; there was nothing but birch trees and snow. The wind picked up eddies of crystals, whipping them around in the knife's-edge moonlight. I walked down the path, as it seemed the thing to do, and still there was no sign of him.

A flash of red caught my eye, and I stopped. A rosebush in full bloom was only feet from the path. I walked to it, and no sooner had the first stem broken off in my hand than arms snaked around my waist from behind. "There you are," I said. I didn't waste time trying to make the rose be anything it wasn't already; as it stood, it had thorns.

I turned in his embrace and slashed the stem across his face. It had no effect; maybe I hadn't even hit him. He grabbed my hair. "It's past time I started this," he hissed, and I stepped away.

"You have all the time in the world, and I have places to be." Leaving the red hood in his hands, I continued down the path, flexing my fingers absently. I felt stronger this way. And the snow - I could use it as cover. It wasn't the same shade as my hair, skin, clothes, but in this light, it didn't matter; the color was close enough.

There was a house at the end of the path, and I went inside, back into the attic. All of the plants were winter gray-brown and dry, and I could see my breath. I could also see every single thing that had been in a box or chest, because there were no boxes or chests any longer.

"You'd no right," I said tightly.

"You offered," he said, and then with a too-sincere smile, "Doesn't your trust count as tacit permission?"

I paused, then dismissed the feeling as déjà vu. "I said what I had to. How do you think this is going to work?"

He shrugged, the movement to small and the turn of his lips too... childish? "You're in charge, right?"

This wasn't déjà vu. "Excuse me?"

"Well?" He crossed his arms, all elbows and I knew that stance, the way he was standing as he shifted his feet. "You're supposed to be the one with the plans."

My lips felt cold and numb. (Yomi, and I'd told him that it wouldn't even if he had it. Kuwabara, and I'd said I was. Hiei, and I'd asked if this was a ruse to stick me with the paperwork.)

He smiled, his own smile, and asked, "Now who knows his victim?"
"Not quite all. Not yet."

"No," he agreed. "Not yet." He threw a bomb my way, and I dodged - right into his arms even though he couldn't possibly be over here already - and he wound my hair around his fingers, dragging back until my neck felt close to breaking. I couldn't move, couldn't even support myself; he was doing that.

"I think," he announced silkily, "I've been very patient. But it's too late now; you said -"

Behind me, the mirror shattered. He let me go, and I staggered as my legs caught my weight again. We both stared down at the millions of fractured images of the huge, gray-pale woman, dozens of her, whole and in bits. She'd punctured her eye now. Fluid ran down her cheek. The hook on her finger swiped out, far from where it could possibly be, nicking bits of both of our hair. She fingered the locks, weaving them in and out of each other in the reflections.

"So close," she said, voice like gravel being crushed. "So close, both of you." She nodded at me, regret tingeing her heavy features. "You long for my realm. It pulls at you. I'll see you yet, even if you don't see me. I'll always be there - just on the other side of your mirror." She sighed, the despondence of ages breaking out of the glass like a wave. "You've made this all so much more complicated than it has to be. If you'd let my twin have you, you'd be mine now," she points at me with a stubby finger, "and you soon after." She nodded to Karasu this time. Her eyes clouded. "You hadn't the sense to come in out the rain."

The bits of glass reflected only odd pieces of the room; that and the door. It wasn't even set in a wall this time, just hanging with nothing behind it (but still locked, still locked). Karasu looked at the key in his hand.

"You have forever," I pointed out, fingers closing convulsively on his arm.

"But you're so afraid of now, Kurama," he said, smiling, and fitted the key to the lock.

"Don't."

He paused, head tilting, and remarked, "There's no one left, is there?" I wasn't sure why breath came shorter, except a conviction that I'd forgotten something. "I'm going to tear you apart," he said, "piece by piece." He stretched out his hand, pulling loose from mine, and a watch went up in an explosion of gears. He grabbed my arm, now, and it didn't matter because I still couldn't move under my own power. "Try to remember meeting Yomi." He moved his hand, and again, a vase this time. "The last thing you said to Kuronue before that heist." A glass rose under a clear dome. "What Yusuke said on the way down the stairs to your mother's hospital bed." He turned the key in the lock, and smiled again. "How long do you think you'll last, Kurama? How long do you think you'll be you?"

I ran.

Trees flickered by at first, snow powdery and deceptively near-flat under our feet, and then there was just snow and the creaking, and I realized that the dip had been an edge - we were on ice. The creaking turned to cracking and I stopped, Karasu sliding to a halt behind me.

"It's going to break," I said, and his hand closed on mine.

"I know."

The water was so cold I managed to hold my breath only by sheer force of will, and I almost didn't mind that I couldn't swim with Karasu hanging onto me, because every place our bodies touched, I could almost retain feeling.

Then he kissed me, and I lost my breath -

and woke up in my bed, in my room, unable to move, a weight heavy across me. Karasu smiled -

and I woke up again, this time jerking so violently I fell from my bed.

A few seconds later, Shiori opened my door, eyes blearily concerned. "Shuuchi? Are you all right?"

I sat up, grinning ruefully. "Except for my pride." I rubbed my eyes. "Weren't you sleeping?"

She looked me over carefully in case of obvious fractures, and smiled absently. "What mother wouldn't hear her child fall?"

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