memento mori, Chapter Four (X/Yami no Matsuei, Subaru, Tsuzuki, Hisoka)
Yeah. Fricken' finally.
I ended up having to split this in two, because Subaru-and-Hisoka POV would have made this chapter far too long.
I -- I fail at writing. orz. And at self-imposed deadlines. So I will not make any promises when Chapter Five's coming out, except to say that it will, really. I'm looking at seven chapters total now, not counting the two outtakes I plan on writing. The whole thing should be about ... 35k, I think. Longest thing I've written in ages.
So I can apparently write plots that sustain themselves for longer than 5000 words or so. Yay.
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG-13 for this chapter, R for later ones. ~5000 words in this chapter, 19420 in the story thus far. Significant spoilers for the Kyoto arc of Yami no Matsuei and for post-Volume 18 of X.
On the eve of Shoro Nagashi, the second division of Enmacho dispatches its shinigami to halt a series of mysterious supernatural deaths; miles away, the Japanese government sends the newest Sakurazukamori to do the same. Three men, two investigations, one killer - how all are alike and unlike.
chapter one x chapter two x chapter three
chapter four: Subaru learns what he's become, and draws the wrath of the dead.
Patches of dry rot creep under Subaru’s feet. He sidesteps them when he can, tries not to bring his full weight to bear on the floorboards, notes how the skin on the back of his neck crawls when the spirits turn towards him. Five ofuda hang suspended in the air at points around him; next to him, Tsuzuki erects his own shield, threads of white light streaming from the ofuda in his fingers. He chants but doesn’t dispel-he’s getting a sense of the place, not exorcising it yet. Never send a Sumeragi to do a Sakurazukamori’s job, he thinks; he almost finds it funny.
“You’re good at this,” Tsuzuki says.
Subaru chants for a few syllables longer, long enough to get a sense of how much power the spirits are keeping in reserve (it’s not inconsiderable), then says, “It’s been my job since I was ten.”
“Just because something’s your job doesn’t mean you’re good at it.” Tsuzuki crouches by a discolored streak on the paneling. Subaru can’t tell color very well in this kind of light, but he suspects it’s red. “I mean, look at me.”
Subaru does, watches as Tsuzuki plasters an ofuda to the stain and chants; the air sucks and hisses, but nothing manifests. “I am,” he says. He imagines red stains on Tsuzuki’s fingers, palms, wrists, and knows he’s correct to do so.
Tsuzuki also knows, because he stares at his hands, then looks back up at Subaru. “How powerful are they?”
“It’s hard to say,” Subaru says, which is true. They haven’t acted yet, and he can guess what they’re capable of from what he’s seen and sensed, but their intent, what they want from all this skulking and silence-he can’t read that. “They’re keeping to themselves.”
“Do you think we scare them?”
“It’s possible.”
“ Maybe they aren’t malicious after all?”
Again, Subaru replies, “It’s possible.” Anything is possible, he almost says, but he doubts Tsuzuki believes that any more than he does.
Tsuzuki stands and straightens, dragging his heel along the floorboards. “It’d be nice if they weren’t.”
“Yes.” Or it would be convenient, at least.
“But you don’t think so.”
“I’m not convinced,” Subaru says. “They could be observing us as we’re observing them, and deciding how to deal with us.” They could be frightened, or cowed by some outside force, or benign until provoked. But they’re here, they’re attached to this place, they want something from this place, and something about that inherently makes them unsafe.
Tsuzuki nods. “Like humans.”
“Yes.”
“So is this your jurisdiction or mine?” he asks, and shoulders open the door to his right. A storage closet, or it once was, though only a handful of cobwebbed bottles line the shelves now. Spiders scuttle along the shelves, and Tsuzuki wrinkles his nose and nudges the door closed.
You could make the case for either, Subaru imagines, but he’s not inclined to do it, not inclined to fret about what prestige might attach itself where. “If they’re your souls, you can claim them.”
Tsuzuki’s smile fades and flickers in the pale light. “Yeah,” he says; the ofuda creases and crinkles in his hand. Subaru waits for his smile to reassert itself, which it does, even if the skin around his mouth pulls too tight, the lines too sharp. “But it’s kind of hard to talk to them when they’re like this, and I don’t know what’ll happen to this building if I summon any of my shiki-Tatsumi’s probably going to fine me again or suspend my pay if it collapses-”
“I’ll perform an exorcism tomorrow, if your superiors don’t mind,” Subaru offers. It’s only polite to offer.
“They won’t. They’ll probably be glad to have someone competent working on a case for once.” Tsuzuki laughs, mostly to himself. The sound is strained, and Tsuzuki stops trying to force it out after a few seconds.’
Subaru wonders how he learned to hate himself this much.
“How long have you worked for Enma-cho?” he asks.
“Good question.” Tsuzuki shrugs, starts counting backwards under his breath as he advances down the hallway. He avoids the spirits starting to congregate around the two of them, or tries to. “Seventy years? Something like that. It’s kind of hard to tell after a while. Nothing much happens in Kyushu. Or, well, nothing much is supposed to happen in Kyushu. Except for Shoro Nagashi,” he adds, “we usually get kind of a rush during Shoro Nagashi because we’ve got all these new arrivals and not enough people to process them, and they all enter Meifu from the same place and it kind of turns into a huge traffic jam. With paperwork. A lot of paperwork. I get to skip it this year if I’m still tied up with this case.”
“Don’t they need you there?”
“Well, nobody-” His voice falters; the cracks in his smile spread. The gesture, the one he’s trying to make-isn’t entirely unfamiliar, Subaru might as well admit that. “Nobody actually needs me. They definitely don’t need the property damage I kind of bring along with me everywhere.”
“Kurosaki-san doesn’t need you?” Subaru asks.
Tsuzuki’s mouth closes. The floorboards creak and whine as Subaru skirts the edge of a rotten patch of wood. His ofuda rustle and hiss, their edges snapping in an unseen wind. Spiritual energy gathers and reshapes itself in his wake, and Subaru receives the distinct impression that the spirits are talking about him behind his back. What do the dead make of him?
“It’s a selfish thing to say,” Tsuzuki says at last. He reaches a room where the door hangs open, the hinges creaking softly as though they’re breathing. The thought triggers something in Subaru, makes him listen for the sound of his own breath, but when he monitors it his breathing softens and grows shallow. But it’s still there, even if he can’t hear it; if he couldn’t breathe, he’d feel it. He’s fairly certain of the fact, or as certain of that as he is of anything else.
“People are selfish,” he says.
Tsuzuki studies the spiderweb spanning the door to one of the patients’ rooms. Forlorn four-legged shapes squat in the corners and sag from dust and disuse. Tsuzuki’s knuckles tighten on the doorframe; the glow of the spirit light strips the color from his hands, or perhaps that’s a function of who he is, what he is. “I’m not a person. Not really.” He sighs. “I’m-it’s hard to say what I am. But people…I think what makes people people is that they can give back. Other people give them things, and they give back. But all I know how to do is take.”
Subaru can feel how Tsuzuki pushes his smile back into place after he finishes speaking. He looks at the stacked bedframes, at the straw ticking spilling from the mattresses, and pictures doctors and nurses ministering to a line of men, forcing their jaws open and funneling food down, changing their sheets and trying to scrub the filth away, all rendered in the same watery greys he’s seeing now.
“I think taking is what people are best at doing, Tsuzuki-san.”
“You might be right.” Tsuzuki inclines his head, hides his face in the long grey shadows, steps back from the door.
But Subaru isn’t quite looking; he sees what Tsuzuki does, notes it, but he’s staring at the mold colonies dotting the wallpaper-beyond them, beyond them and through the shimmer of spirits shuffling through the hallway, past the vines twining through cracks in the windows, past every trace of time marking this place, marring it. “We want to give, but…we don’t know what other people want us to give. We can’t.”
He remembers himself at sixteen, voice cracking and trembling: You can’ t understand what Hashimoto-san’s pain is like. Was that only ten years ago?
“So we seize what we can,” he continues, “and we never want to let it go, because if it’s ours, we-we might know what it means,” but that-he knows that isn’t true, “or we can make it mean something to us. But we still don’t know what the other person meant by it.”
“Yeah.” Tsuzuki crams his hands deeper into his pockets, muting the ofuda’s glow. “If I can ask something…”
“That’s fine.” It isn’t, of course, but it doesn’t matter.
“Who did this to you, Sumeragi-san?”
The air in his lungs solidifies. That’s the only explanation he can think of for the pressure, the dull blocked pain…
Subaru strokes the backs of his hands through the gloves, but nothing flares beneath them, no brands burn, sweat beads on his palms and dampens the leather but that’s something he’s created. “My-” And he stops, he can’t, he can’t. There are so many-so many words for him and none of them are enough. He decides on the least of them: “My predecessor. And myself.”
“Was he a cruel man?” Tsuzuki asks
“Yes,” Subaru says, then amends that. “No. Not for the sake of being cruel. He wanted-” he wanted me to-he wanted me to be his, always, and- “-a challenge. He wanted me to understand.”
“Did you?”
Subaru scatters his lights to the corners of the room; the shadows stretch and lengthen. “It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. He won’t reincarnate.” The sakura’s victims don’t, they’re too dangerous to be reborn. Old souls return to old habits sooner or later, he thinks. “I suppose I won’t, either.”
Tsuzuki examines him, one of the spirit lights drifting closer to his face as he does so. His eyes are the same shade of purple Kamui’s are-were. He wonders what, if anything, that signifies
“…no,” Tsuzuki says, takes a half-step back and lets his hand fall to his side. “You won’t, I-I can see that. I’m sorry.”
Subaru doesn’t quite shrug but it’s the same sentiment, he has enough sins in this life without dragging the weight of them with him into whatever form he’d assume when reborn and he’s tired, so tired, he’s twenty-six years old and…he can’t complete the thought, there’s nothing left to complete it with. “It’s my fate,” he says. “I can’t change it.”
They lapse into silence after that. The spirits wait-perhaps their behavior now reflects what they were expected to do when they were alive. Wait for meals, wait for medicines, wait for the soft putter of an engine pulling up to the front gate, wait for assistance, wait for death. What are they waiting for now? Subaru keeps the ofuda suspended at points around him; the spirits keep to the edges of his and Tsuzuki’s shields, press against them but don’t try to break through. Are they testing him? Is it something else-are they curious? Subaru doubts they received many visitors when they were alive, but that’s because he can’t imagine anyone inhabiting this place, anyone staying longer than duty compelled them to.
“I guess we can probably leave this place soon,” Tsuzuki says, resting his back against the bathroom door. His trenchcoat trails in the crumbled leaves and clods of dirt. “And we can keep our shiki monitoring it, in case the killer comes back. The spirits don’t seem hostile-well, not directly-so…it’s your judgment call, but I don’t think you need to perform an exorcism tonight.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Subaru says. “I haven’t purified myself.”
It’s almost funny. He doesn’t laugh.
Tsuzuki nods once, twice, slowly, darts his gaze towards the chips in the windowpanes and the weak light filtering through them. “I wonder if this place gets any better during the daytime.”
“You can see more clearly,” Subaru says. Then again, do you want to?
“I already see more than I want to.” Subaru hears the cloth of Tsuzuki’s coat flap and twist. “Like-”
“Yes?”
“I’m not sure how to explain this-” But he breathes in and continues nonetheless. “Our powers are similar to yours, in some ways. Our magic works like yours does, more or less.”
“Your mastery of shikigami’s greater than mine is,” Subaru says, because it’s fact.
Tsuzuki scratches the back of his head at the compliment, mumbles a vague denial. “It’s just what I have to do for my job. Anyway, we can see the dead, we can sense their presence, we can communicate with them. Some shinigami are better at it than others, but every shinigami knows how to do it.”
Where is he going with this?
And as though Tsuzuki’s heard Subaru’s thoughts: “What I’m getting at is-we don’t just see the dead. We see life, too. When it’s strong, when it’s about to end, when it’s stopped but the body keeps living on. Shinigami are the last one, basically. When we walk around in this world, we have bodies, we have souls, even, but we’re not alive. We just exist. And time-life-stops inside us. Our bodies don’t age or die or change. I guess you could call it immortality, but it’s more like…if life moves in cycles, then we’ve fallen off the rotation somehow. Time goes forward, but we don’t. We’re stuck on the side.”
“But you can be reborn,” Subaru says. His throat feels as though someone’s tipped hot ash down it: burning, scratching, tight and red and raw. “Can’t you?”
“Yeah, but-well, some shinigami do, but usually you don’t become a shinigami unless you’re stuck. Unless there’s something keeping you from moving forward.”
“Tsuzuki-san,” he says, and nothing more than that.
The ghost lights hover near Tsuzuki’s shoulder, and the shadows on his face lengthen, form a black shroud over his features. “You’re like us, Sumeragi-san. You-you exist, but you’re not alive. And if you’re not alive, you can’t die.”
No, he thinks, no no no no no roars through his head and immolates every other thought but somehow his lips move and shape the words, “I don’t understand.”
“I can’t tell you exactly how it happened,” Tsuzuki’s saying, “I don’t really know enough about the Sakurazukamori, or at least I don’t know as much as you must.”
And Subaru knows, knows and almost laughs, because there’s nothing else, there’s nothing left.
“The Sakurazukamori is succeeded by the person he loves most.” Something’s sucked the moisture from Subaru’s eyes; he closes them to wet them. “And to succeed the Sakurazukamori, you have to kill him. That’s how the clan continues.”
“So when you meet the person who’s going to succeed you, maybe-” Tsuzuki’s voice falters, the false cheer fading.
“I will have no successor,” he says. Stark, no inflection. This is fact now, it is what it is, and what it is-he can’t complete that thought. Won’t complete it, the-the enormity of this, he’s still dazed by it, the outlines of Tsuzuki’s coat blur into the darkness and the shape of his face wavers, distorts, and…
…and Subaru could be angered by this, saddened, frightened, anything. He could be. He would have been. He wants to believe he would have been.
He wipes the dust from the placard hanging over the door. It doesn’t matter; he’ll have to wash this suit or dispose of it soon enough. This job makes him wasteful. “I killed the person I loved the most.”
“Your-your predecessor, right?”
“Yes.”
The silence isn’t particularly deafening; floorboards creak, leaves rasp and rattle in the breeze seeping through the cracked windows, bats rustle somewhere overhead, the spirits shift and glide closer to the edges of his shield, encircling it, enfolding him. Time moves.
“I know this offer probably won’t be very useful,” Tsuzuki says, “but if there’s anything I can do, anything else I can tell you…”
“How do you live with it?” Subaru asks.
Tsuzuki pauses, considering. “See,” he says, “that’s the thing. I don’t know if I’m really living.”
At the end of the hall, the staircase groans. Subaru pivots, flings his ofuda and calls forth his doves, his shield’s still holding, good-Tsuzuki’s speaking next to him, telling him to wait, grabbing his arm and trying to push it down-
“It’s me!” Kurosaki hisses from the darkness.
The doves melt and flutter to the ground as scraps of paper.
“Couldn’t you at least sense your shiki?” Kurosaki asks, and Subaru feels six red eyes burning reproachfully at him through the darkness. “What the hell-”
“You’re right,” he says. “I should have sensed that. Are you hurt?”
“No, you called them off before they reached me, but-look, I came up here because I figured something out-”
“Um, you two?” Tsuzuki says. “I think we just made the spirits mad at us.”
He’s not wrong. Hostility rolls towards the three of them in waves and gathers itself inward, twists into a column; black threads lash at his ofuda and the five-pointed star wavers, struggles to maintain its shape. The spirits coalesce-he can see them now, the men (and one or two women, he thinks, but he isn’t looking very hard for that) who died here, ghostly gnarled fingers picking apart the spells he and Tsuzuki wove. The spirit lights flare and dim until they sputter out, the spell’s too weak to hold up against a concentrated attack like this-
Subaru commands his shiki to attack, hikuu, as Tsuzuki chants next to him. That’s an old spell, very old, one he half-recognizes, and each syllable quakes with power, drains the warmth from the air. He thinks he hears Kurosaki groan somewhere behind him, then the sound of glass splintering and shattering. The starlight shining through the broken window casts a weak beam across the hallway, but they hardly need the illumination, not with the brilliance enveloping Tsuzuki; Kurosaki says, “Come on, we can get out this way,” and Subaru’s shiki rakes its talons across the first row of advancing spirits, but he’s more intent on-
“Come forth, Byakko!”
-that.
How did he manage to gain mastery over one of the Four Gods?
“Let’s go!” Tsuzuki shouts over Byakko’s howls and the spirits’ hisses. “Sumeragi-san, about that exorcism-”
He hasn’t purified himself since his last kill. “I can attempt one now,” he says, “but I don’t know how effective it will be.”
Byakko and Subaru’s shiki attack in tandem, ichor dripping from teeth and claws and beaks and talons, crackling red cuts laced across flank and feathers as the spirits lash back. The floorboards beneath them buckle and splinter-shards of wood bury themselves in the walls and avoid burying themselves in Subaru’s shoulder, but only just. He inhales a combination of dust and dry rot, chokes on it.
Can this kill him? If he dropped his shields and walked into the fray taking place before him, would he die?
-no, he won’t test it, he could if he was someone else, but he isn’t.
Tsuzuki plasters an ofuda to the windowsill and hops up onto it as winds whip around him, fan his trenchcoat out and add their shrieks to the shiki’s cries and spirits’ moans. “I’ll help,” he says, tugging Kurosaki’s arm up; there’s blood congealing on his elbow, gleaming silver in the moonlight. “Hisoka-”
“I can get out on my own.” He winces, but manages to hoist himself up. “I’ll help you cast.”
Pain lances through Subaru’s left eye-ah-sakanagi, it’s just sakanagi, one of the spirits clawed out his shiki’s eye. Byakko roars and pounces, pins as many spirits as he can beneath his paws, but they slide away, try to twine his legs together; his haunches ripples as he kicks them free and scatters them across the hall in the process, but a nasty gash opens up on his flank. Stitches, Subaru thinks before he can stop himself, he needs stitches, and why is he still thinking about things like this? He draws three more ofuda from his breast pocket, wets them, flings them towards one end of the hallway and repeats the process for the other. He feels rather than hears them stick, good, he needs to plant a few more on the roof-
Something black and reeking of tar and old blood slices across his cheek, bites in deep, past the skin and down to the muscle; he shouts and staggers backwards, blood drips into his mouth and dribbles down his chin. The roof. Yes. Knotted finger-claws grab his ankles but he kicks them away, doesn’t dare call fire in this building with Kurosaki and Tsuzuki still either inside it or clinging to the outside of it but does call his doves again and has them tear through the mass of spirits, shredding their grip. The windowsill catches him in the back, a different kind of pain-he ignores it and clambers out the window, hoists himself to the roof. The tiles slip and scatter under his hands and feet, and darkness coils around his joints, tries to tug him back inside. He rips free, slaps an ofuda in place, then another. They steam at the edges, moisture evaporating as lightning arcs across them. He jars more tiles loose and hears them shatter; Tsuzuki and Kurosaki stand on the peak of the overhang, a meter or two below him, and start to chant. Subaru sees light sparking from the ofuda Tsuzuki’s managed to plant-he just needs two more, he’s almost at the roof’s peak now-
-hot agony sears into his back but he’s had worse, even if his cheek starts to bleed and burn again-
There. His fingernails find purchase on the peak, anchoring themselves in the grout between the tiles. He pulls himself up to standing, or at least crouching, holds onto the rooftop with one hand and flings the final two ofuda free with the other. The coils snake around his wrists again, but he wrenches them free, clasps his hands together, chants.
“ On sowahanba shuda saraba tamara sowahanba shudo kan... On tatagyato dohanbaya sowaka...”
The spirits shriek in fury, pit their wills against his and push back with all their power, but this, this he knows how to do. Through the winds and pieces of flying tile he sees Tsuzuki's hands on Kurosaki's shoulders, white against the denim; they chant in tandem with Subaru. White lines of energy blaze through the air and connect the ofuda, fence the spirits in and scorch any foolish enough to test its strength. Subaru thinks of the smell of charred dead flesh and doesn’t gag as much as he thought he might.
“On sowahanba shuda saraba tamara sowahanba shudo kan... On tatagyato dohanbaya sowaka...”
The-whatever it is on his back, the wound reopens; blood trickles past his waistband and soaks into his suit, it’s really more sticky than painful and a part of his mind fixes on the fact that it’s his own blood on the suit now and it-hasn’t been, hasn’t been that case in months…
Finish it. It’s time to finish it. He concentrates, and when he calls it forth, the power humming through him makes his teeth chatter.
“On barodaya... sowaka.”
The lines strengthen, solidify, burn. The scent of ozone fills the air, ozone and burnt paper. The kekkai holds; they’ve contained the power. Now to stop it. He feels Tsuzuki and Kurosaki breathe in together, and the three of them chant:
“On boku ken.”
Subaru collapses forward, his forehead skidding across the tiles-he grips the sides of the roof before he topples off it, but he didn’t purify himself before this, he hasn’t prepared anything to deflect the sakanagi. Taking care of that isn’t difficult, far from it, it’s what he knows and what he’s learned how to do, but this-
He wonders what the killer will think if he returns to this place. Perhaps they’ve scared him away permanently, or perhaps they’ve intrigued him, perhaps he’ll want to know what happened here, what caused the disturbance. The latter makes finding him easier, but Subaru still-he knows it will end, that it has to, but he doesn’t know how. His back’s still burning. Our bodies don’t age or die or change, Tsuzuki said; will the wound heal without a trace, then? Will physical injury affect him at all? Or will he wear all the damage he receives until he’s nothing but lesions and scars, red raw skin and dried-no, no, that would mean someone else marked him and Seishirou didn’t want that, Wished for the opposite and that’s fine, if-if Subaru can’t have the right scars, he doesn’t want any at all.
“Are they gone?” Kurosaki asks.
“Not exactly,” Tsuzuki says. “We stopped all the magical energy in this area, but we didn’t get rid of it. They’ll be back. And they won’t be too happy with us, we hit them with a pretty powerful spell…are you all right, Sumeragi-san? Will you be able to get down from the roof?”
“I’m fine,” he replies. It isn’t quite a lie. “And I’ll manage.” He’s jumped farther than this before; he’s no Windcaster, but his body remembers what to do, how to position himself, how to land. Fallen tiles crunch under his shoes. The gash on his back aches but not enough to hospitalize him, he doesn’t think, he just needs bandages and rest and he can obtain the first easily enough. Tsuzuki holds out a hand to Kurosaki, who rebuffs it and leaps off the roof before Tsuzuki can insist. He lands a meter or so from Subaru and crosses his arms, his knuckles spreading and whitening.
“You could have killed me,” Kurosaki says, eyes blazing. “You could have killed all of us, you could have collapsed the building on our heads-”
“I didn’t.” Subaru reaches for a cigarette, for his lighter, for something for his hands to do. “And I wasn’t aware you could kill a shinigami.” He doesn’t need to add so easily.
“No, but you can make it a lot harder for us to do our jobs.”
Subaru flips his lighter open and pauses as the flame flickers. “And what is your job now, Kurosaki-san?”
“I was going to say that our job is the same as yours.” Kurosaki’s eyes narrow. “But I don’t think it is. What do you want to do with the killer, Sumeragi?”
“What I want doesn’t enter into this.”
“What are you going to do, then? If you catch him first?”
“Hisoka!” Tsuzuki jogs over, wipes the back of his hand across his forehead. It comes away streaked with blood.
“You’re hurt,” Kurosaki says.
“It’s just a cut. It looks worse than it is, head wounds bleed a lot. What were you going to tell us back in there? You said you figured something out.”
Kurosaki tugs his jacket open and slides a slim book out from beneath it. Subaru leans closer, squints to read the title and the furigana to the right of the kanji: Under the Cherry Blossom Tree.
Kurosaki flinches when Subaru does.
“Are you okay?” Tsuzuki asks-asks Kurosaki, not Subaru.
“I’m fine. I found this book in the bathroom on the first floor.”
“I guess someone’s grandkid left it there-”
“Look at the reprint date, Tsuzuki.”
He complies; Subaru doesn’t bother.
“1992,” Kurosaki continues. “Almost fifteen years after the hospital closed. A children’s book published eight years ago in a hospital for the age that’s been shut down for decades.”
A child. Subaru realizes it as Tsuzuki does.
He remembers-so much, blood dripping from the sky like rain, splashing on his cheek and sticking to his eyelashes, sakura petals whipping in the wind, winter air sucking the heat from his blood and hers, from the victim’s, air leaking out the hole in her lung in puffs of white and even Seishirou’s hand lodged in her chest can’t prevent the escape-
Another child. Does this move in circles?
“Hisoka-Hisoka,” Tsuzuki’s saying.
Kurosaki hoists himself out of Tsuzuki’s grasp and stands on shaking legs, glaring at Subaru. “What the hell did you-”
“Hisoka, it’s not his fault-”
Isn’t it? Subaru thinks.
“Bullshit,” Kurosaki snaps.
“This is just his job, Hisoka. Just like it’s ours. All right?”
“It’s not all right,” Kurosaki mumbles.
Subaru concurs, takes a long drag on his cigarette. He barely notices the taste anymore.
“We should look into children who’ve disappeared around here,” Tsuzuki says. “Children who’ve been declared dead but don’t appear in Meifu’s records, or children who haven’t been enrolled in school for a long time.”
“Or kids who never got enrolled in the first place.” Kurosaki’s fingers tighten around the book.
“And runaways,” Tsuzuki adds.
Kurosaki gives him a withering stare. “Any kid old enough to run away wouldn’t be reading this kind of book.”
“You never know. Some children get an earlier start on that kind of thing than others. And maybe the book’s more of a keepsake?”
“Sure,” Kurosaki says, “I guess. I wonder why the kid didn’t die…”
“I imagine the spirits here would take well to a child,” Subaru says. “To any visitor. That might be why they didn’t attack us at first; they wanted company.”
Kurosaki snorts.
“I’ll call Tatsumi and ask him to go through the records,” Tsuzuki says, flipping open his cell phone. “I know he has connections in this world, he can look through the records here, too-”
“He can use my security clearance if he wants.” Subaru drops his cigarette to the ground, grinds it under his heel. He hadn’t realized that he’d finished it. “That should give him access to anything he needs.”
“Thanks.” Tsuzuki’s smile flashes in the dark. “I guess Byakko and your shiki can keep an eye or six on this place, just in case the killer tries to come back here.”
And what will the child think when he sees what’s been done? Subaru thinks, but doesn’t say.
Maybe all people who do bad things…are just really lonely.
He closes his eyes.
Have not written magical combat in far too long. Have missed it a lot. Chant stolen from a website that I think stole it from one of the volumes of TB, though I can't recall which one offhand; the spell's supposed to create a powerful kekkai, trap the magical energies within it, then stops them.
...Subaru's laying down the ofuda in the shape of a decagram, by the way. Or two overlapping pentagrams, at least.
And yes, this chapter does have a ton of TB quotes in it. See if you can find them all! (It's, er, not that hard, I used a lot of the fairly famous ones.)
I ended up having to split this in two, because Subaru-and-Hisoka POV would have made this chapter far too long.
I -- I fail at writing. orz. And at self-imposed deadlines. So I will not make any promises when Chapter Five's coming out, except to say that it will, really. I'm looking at seven chapters total now, not counting the two outtakes I plan on writing. The whole thing should be about ... 35k, I think. Longest thing I've written in ages.
So I can apparently write plots that sustain themselves for longer than 5000 words or so. Yay.
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG-13 for this chapter, R for later ones. ~5000 words in this chapter, 19420 in the story thus far. Significant spoilers for the Kyoto arc of Yami no Matsuei and for post-Volume 18 of X.
On the eve of Shoro Nagashi, the second division of Enmacho dispatches its shinigami to halt a series of mysterious supernatural deaths; miles away, the Japanese government sends the newest Sakurazukamori to do the same. Three men, two investigations, one killer - how all are alike and unlike.
chapter one x chapter two x chapter three
chapter four: Subaru learns what he's become, and draws the wrath of the dead.
Patches of dry rot creep under Subaru’s feet. He sidesteps them when he can, tries not to bring his full weight to bear on the floorboards, notes how the skin on the back of his neck crawls when the spirits turn towards him. Five ofuda hang suspended in the air at points around him; next to him, Tsuzuki erects his own shield, threads of white light streaming from the ofuda in his fingers. He chants but doesn’t dispel-he’s getting a sense of the place, not exorcising it yet. Never send a Sumeragi to do a Sakurazukamori’s job, he thinks; he almost finds it funny.
“You’re good at this,” Tsuzuki says.
Subaru chants for a few syllables longer, long enough to get a sense of how much power the spirits are keeping in reserve (it’s not inconsiderable), then says, “It’s been my job since I was ten.”
“Just because something’s your job doesn’t mean you’re good at it.” Tsuzuki crouches by a discolored streak on the paneling. Subaru can’t tell color very well in this kind of light, but he suspects it’s red. “I mean, look at me.”
Subaru does, watches as Tsuzuki plasters an ofuda to the stain and chants; the air sucks and hisses, but nothing manifests. “I am,” he says. He imagines red stains on Tsuzuki’s fingers, palms, wrists, and knows he’s correct to do so.
Tsuzuki also knows, because he stares at his hands, then looks back up at Subaru. “How powerful are they?”
“It’s hard to say,” Subaru says, which is true. They haven’t acted yet, and he can guess what they’re capable of from what he’s seen and sensed, but their intent, what they want from all this skulking and silence-he can’t read that. “They’re keeping to themselves.”
“Do you think we scare them?”
“It’s possible.”
“ Maybe they aren’t malicious after all?”
Again, Subaru replies, “It’s possible.” Anything is possible, he almost says, but he doubts Tsuzuki believes that any more than he does.
Tsuzuki stands and straightens, dragging his heel along the floorboards. “It’d be nice if they weren’t.”
“Yes.” Or it would be convenient, at least.
“But you don’t think so.”
“I’m not convinced,” Subaru says. “They could be observing us as we’re observing them, and deciding how to deal with us.” They could be frightened, or cowed by some outside force, or benign until provoked. But they’re here, they’re attached to this place, they want something from this place, and something about that inherently makes them unsafe.
Tsuzuki nods. “Like humans.”
“Yes.”
“So is this your jurisdiction or mine?” he asks, and shoulders open the door to his right. A storage closet, or it once was, though only a handful of cobwebbed bottles line the shelves now. Spiders scuttle along the shelves, and Tsuzuki wrinkles his nose and nudges the door closed.
You could make the case for either, Subaru imagines, but he’s not inclined to do it, not inclined to fret about what prestige might attach itself where. “If they’re your souls, you can claim them.”
Tsuzuki’s smile fades and flickers in the pale light. “Yeah,” he says; the ofuda creases and crinkles in his hand. Subaru waits for his smile to reassert itself, which it does, even if the skin around his mouth pulls too tight, the lines too sharp. “But it’s kind of hard to talk to them when they’re like this, and I don’t know what’ll happen to this building if I summon any of my shiki-Tatsumi’s probably going to fine me again or suspend my pay if it collapses-”
“I’ll perform an exorcism tomorrow, if your superiors don’t mind,” Subaru offers. It’s only polite to offer.
“They won’t. They’ll probably be glad to have someone competent working on a case for once.” Tsuzuki laughs, mostly to himself. The sound is strained, and Tsuzuki stops trying to force it out after a few seconds.’
Subaru wonders how he learned to hate himself this much.
“How long have you worked for Enma-cho?” he asks.
“Good question.” Tsuzuki shrugs, starts counting backwards under his breath as he advances down the hallway. He avoids the spirits starting to congregate around the two of them, or tries to. “Seventy years? Something like that. It’s kind of hard to tell after a while. Nothing much happens in Kyushu. Or, well, nothing much is supposed to happen in Kyushu. Except for Shoro Nagashi,” he adds, “we usually get kind of a rush during Shoro Nagashi because we’ve got all these new arrivals and not enough people to process them, and they all enter Meifu from the same place and it kind of turns into a huge traffic jam. With paperwork. A lot of paperwork. I get to skip it this year if I’m still tied up with this case.”
“Don’t they need you there?”
“Well, nobody-” His voice falters; the cracks in his smile spread. The gesture, the one he’s trying to make-isn’t entirely unfamiliar, Subaru might as well admit that. “Nobody actually needs me. They definitely don’t need the property damage I kind of bring along with me everywhere.”
“Kurosaki-san doesn’t need you?” Subaru asks.
Tsuzuki’s mouth closes. The floorboards creak and whine as Subaru skirts the edge of a rotten patch of wood. His ofuda rustle and hiss, their edges snapping in an unseen wind. Spiritual energy gathers and reshapes itself in his wake, and Subaru receives the distinct impression that the spirits are talking about him behind his back. What do the dead make of him?
“It’s a selfish thing to say,” Tsuzuki says at last. He reaches a room where the door hangs open, the hinges creaking softly as though they’re breathing. The thought triggers something in Subaru, makes him listen for the sound of his own breath, but when he monitors it his breathing softens and grows shallow. But it’s still there, even if he can’t hear it; if he couldn’t breathe, he’d feel it. He’s fairly certain of the fact, or as certain of that as he is of anything else.
“People are selfish,” he says.
Tsuzuki studies the spiderweb spanning the door to one of the patients’ rooms. Forlorn four-legged shapes squat in the corners and sag from dust and disuse. Tsuzuki’s knuckles tighten on the doorframe; the glow of the spirit light strips the color from his hands, or perhaps that’s a function of who he is, what he is. “I’m not a person. Not really.” He sighs. “I’m-it’s hard to say what I am. But people…I think what makes people people is that they can give back. Other people give them things, and they give back. But all I know how to do is take.”
Subaru can feel how Tsuzuki pushes his smile back into place after he finishes speaking. He looks at the stacked bedframes, at the straw ticking spilling from the mattresses, and pictures doctors and nurses ministering to a line of men, forcing their jaws open and funneling food down, changing their sheets and trying to scrub the filth away, all rendered in the same watery greys he’s seeing now.
“I think taking is what people are best at doing, Tsuzuki-san.”
“You might be right.” Tsuzuki inclines his head, hides his face in the long grey shadows, steps back from the door.
But Subaru isn’t quite looking; he sees what Tsuzuki does, notes it, but he’s staring at the mold colonies dotting the wallpaper-beyond them, beyond them and through the shimmer of spirits shuffling through the hallway, past the vines twining through cracks in the windows, past every trace of time marking this place, marring it. “We want to give, but…we don’t know what other people want us to give. We can’t.”
He remembers himself at sixteen, voice cracking and trembling: You can’ t understand what Hashimoto-san’s pain is like. Was that only ten years ago?
“So we seize what we can,” he continues, “and we never want to let it go, because if it’s ours, we-we might know what it means,” but that-he knows that isn’t true, “or we can make it mean something to us. But we still don’t know what the other person meant by it.”
“Yeah.” Tsuzuki crams his hands deeper into his pockets, muting the ofuda’s glow. “If I can ask something…”
“That’s fine.” It isn’t, of course, but it doesn’t matter.
“Who did this to you, Sumeragi-san?”
The air in his lungs solidifies. That’s the only explanation he can think of for the pressure, the dull blocked pain…
Subaru strokes the backs of his hands through the gloves, but nothing flares beneath them, no brands burn, sweat beads on his palms and dampens the leather but that’s something he’s created. “My-” And he stops, he can’t, he can’t. There are so many-so many words for him and none of them are enough. He decides on the least of them: “My predecessor. And myself.”
“Was he a cruel man?” Tsuzuki asks
“Yes,” Subaru says, then amends that. “No. Not for the sake of being cruel. He wanted-” he wanted me to-he wanted me to be his, always, and- “-a challenge. He wanted me to understand.”
“Did you?”
Subaru scatters his lights to the corners of the room; the shadows stretch and lengthen. “It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. He won’t reincarnate.” The sakura’s victims don’t, they’re too dangerous to be reborn. Old souls return to old habits sooner or later, he thinks. “I suppose I won’t, either.”
Tsuzuki examines him, one of the spirit lights drifting closer to his face as he does so. His eyes are the same shade of purple Kamui’s are-were. He wonders what, if anything, that signifies
“…no,” Tsuzuki says, takes a half-step back and lets his hand fall to his side. “You won’t, I-I can see that. I’m sorry.”
Subaru doesn’t quite shrug but it’s the same sentiment, he has enough sins in this life without dragging the weight of them with him into whatever form he’d assume when reborn and he’s tired, so tired, he’s twenty-six years old and…he can’t complete the thought, there’s nothing left to complete it with. “It’s my fate,” he says. “I can’t change it.”
They lapse into silence after that. The spirits wait-perhaps their behavior now reflects what they were expected to do when they were alive. Wait for meals, wait for medicines, wait for the soft putter of an engine pulling up to the front gate, wait for assistance, wait for death. What are they waiting for now? Subaru keeps the ofuda suspended at points around him; the spirits keep to the edges of his and Tsuzuki’s shields, press against them but don’t try to break through. Are they testing him? Is it something else-are they curious? Subaru doubts they received many visitors when they were alive, but that’s because he can’t imagine anyone inhabiting this place, anyone staying longer than duty compelled them to.
“I guess we can probably leave this place soon,” Tsuzuki says, resting his back against the bathroom door. His trenchcoat trails in the crumbled leaves and clods of dirt. “And we can keep our shiki monitoring it, in case the killer comes back. The spirits don’t seem hostile-well, not directly-so…it’s your judgment call, but I don’t think you need to perform an exorcism tonight.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Subaru says. “I haven’t purified myself.”
It’s almost funny. He doesn’t laugh.
Tsuzuki nods once, twice, slowly, darts his gaze towards the chips in the windowpanes and the weak light filtering through them. “I wonder if this place gets any better during the daytime.”
“You can see more clearly,” Subaru says. Then again, do you want to?
“I already see more than I want to.” Subaru hears the cloth of Tsuzuki’s coat flap and twist. “Like-”
“Yes?”
“I’m not sure how to explain this-” But he breathes in and continues nonetheless. “Our powers are similar to yours, in some ways. Our magic works like yours does, more or less.”
“Your mastery of shikigami’s greater than mine is,” Subaru says, because it’s fact.
Tsuzuki scratches the back of his head at the compliment, mumbles a vague denial. “It’s just what I have to do for my job. Anyway, we can see the dead, we can sense their presence, we can communicate with them. Some shinigami are better at it than others, but every shinigami knows how to do it.”
Where is he going with this?
And as though Tsuzuki’s heard Subaru’s thoughts: “What I’m getting at is-we don’t just see the dead. We see life, too. When it’s strong, when it’s about to end, when it’s stopped but the body keeps living on. Shinigami are the last one, basically. When we walk around in this world, we have bodies, we have souls, even, but we’re not alive. We just exist. And time-life-stops inside us. Our bodies don’t age or die or change. I guess you could call it immortality, but it’s more like…if life moves in cycles, then we’ve fallen off the rotation somehow. Time goes forward, but we don’t. We’re stuck on the side.”
“But you can be reborn,” Subaru says. His throat feels as though someone’s tipped hot ash down it: burning, scratching, tight and red and raw. “Can’t you?”
“Yeah, but-well, some shinigami do, but usually you don’t become a shinigami unless you’re stuck. Unless there’s something keeping you from moving forward.”
“Tsuzuki-san,” he says, and nothing more than that.
The ghost lights hover near Tsuzuki’s shoulder, and the shadows on his face lengthen, form a black shroud over his features. “You’re like us, Sumeragi-san. You-you exist, but you’re not alive. And if you’re not alive, you can’t die.”
No, he thinks, no no no no no roars through his head and immolates every other thought but somehow his lips move and shape the words, “I don’t understand.”
“I can’t tell you exactly how it happened,” Tsuzuki’s saying, “I don’t really know enough about the Sakurazukamori, or at least I don’t know as much as you must.”
And Subaru knows, knows and almost laughs, because there’s nothing else, there’s nothing left.
“The Sakurazukamori is succeeded by the person he loves most.” Something’s sucked the moisture from Subaru’s eyes; he closes them to wet them. “And to succeed the Sakurazukamori, you have to kill him. That’s how the clan continues.”
“So when you meet the person who’s going to succeed you, maybe-” Tsuzuki’s voice falters, the false cheer fading.
“I will have no successor,” he says. Stark, no inflection. This is fact now, it is what it is, and what it is-he can’t complete that thought. Won’t complete it, the-the enormity of this, he’s still dazed by it, the outlines of Tsuzuki’s coat blur into the darkness and the shape of his face wavers, distorts, and…
…and Subaru could be angered by this, saddened, frightened, anything. He could be. He would have been. He wants to believe he would have been.
He wipes the dust from the placard hanging over the door. It doesn’t matter; he’ll have to wash this suit or dispose of it soon enough. This job makes him wasteful. “I killed the person I loved the most.”
“Your-your predecessor, right?”
“Yes.”
The silence isn’t particularly deafening; floorboards creak, leaves rasp and rattle in the breeze seeping through the cracked windows, bats rustle somewhere overhead, the spirits shift and glide closer to the edges of his shield, encircling it, enfolding him. Time moves.
“I know this offer probably won’t be very useful,” Tsuzuki says, “but if there’s anything I can do, anything else I can tell you…”
“How do you live with it?” Subaru asks.
Tsuzuki pauses, considering. “See,” he says, “that’s the thing. I don’t know if I’m really living.”
At the end of the hall, the staircase groans. Subaru pivots, flings his ofuda and calls forth his doves, his shield’s still holding, good-Tsuzuki’s speaking next to him, telling him to wait, grabbing his arm and trying to push it down-
“It’s me!” Kurosaki hisses from the darkness.
The doves melt and flutter to the ground as scraps of paper.
“Couldn’t you at least sense your shiki?” Kurosaki asks, and Subaru feels six red eyes burning reproachfully at him through the darkness. “What the hell-”
“You’re right,” he says. “I should have sensed that. Are you hurt?”
“No, you called them off before they reached me, but-look, I came up here because I figured something out-”
“Um, you two?” Tsuzuki says. “I think we just made the spirits mad at us.”
He’s not wrong. Hostility rolls towards the three of them in waves and gathers itself inward, twists into a column; black threads lash at his ofuda and the five-pointed star wavers, struggles to maintain its shape. The spirits coalesce-he can see them now, the men (and one or two women, he thinks, but he isn’t looking very hard for that) who died here, ghostly gnarled fingers picking apart the spells he and Tsuzuki wove. The spirit lights flare and dim until they sputter out, the spell’s too weak to hold up against a concentrated attack like this-
Subaru commands his shiki to attack, hikuu, as Tsuzuki chants next to him. That’s an old spell, very old, one he half-recognizes, and each syllable quakes with power, drains the warmth from the air. He thinks he hears Kurosaki groan somewhere behind him, then the sound of glass splintering and shattering. The starlight shining through the broken window casts a weak beam across the hallway, but they hardly need the illumination, not with the brilliance enveloping Tsuzuki; Kurosaki says, “Come on, we can get out this way,” and Subaru’s shiki rakes its talons across the first row of advancing spirits, but he’s more intent on-
“Come forth, Byakko!”
-that.
How did he manage to gain mastery over one of the Four Gods?
“Let’s go!” Tsuzuki shouts over Byakko’s howls and the spirits’ hisses. “Sumeragi-san, about that exorcism-”
He hasn’t purified himself since his last kill. “I can attempt one now,” he says, “but I don’t know how effective it will be.”
Byakko and Subaru’s shiki attack in tandem, ichor dripping from teeth and claws and beaks and talons, crackling red cuts laced across flank and feathers as the spirits lash back. The floorboards beneath them buckle and splinter-shards of wood bury themselves in the walls and avoid burying themselves in Subaru’s shoulder, but only just. He inhales a combination of dust and dry rot, chokes on it.
Can this kill him? If he dropped his shields and walked into the fray taking place before him, would he die?
-no, he won’t test it, he could if he was someone else, but he isn’t.
Tsuzuki plasters an ofuda to the windowsill and hops up onto it as winds whip around him, fan his trenchcoat out and add their shrieks to the shiki’s cries and spirits’ moans. “I’ll help,” he says, tugging Kurosaki’s arm up; there’s blood congealing on his elbow, gleaming silver in the moonlight. “Hisoka-”
“I can get out on my own.” He winces, but manages to hoist himself up. “I’ll help you cast.”
Pain lances through Subaru’s left eye-ah-sakanagi, it’s just sakanagi, one of the spirits clawed out his shiki’s eye. Byakko roars and pounces, pins as many spirits as he can beneath his paws, but they slide away, try to twine his legs together; his haunches ripples as he kicks them free and scatters them across the hall in the process, but a nasty gash opens up on his flank. Stitches, Subaru thinks before he can stop himself, he needs stitches, and why is he still thinking about things like this? He draws three more ofuda from his breast pocket, wets them, flings them towards one end of the hallway and repeats the process for the other. He feels rather than hears them stick, good, he needs to plant a few more on the roof-
Something black and reeking of tar and old blood slices across his cheek, bites in deep, past the skin and down to the muscle; he shouts and staggers backwards, blood drips into his mouth and dribbles down his chin. The roof. Yes. Knotted finger-claws grab his ankles but he kicks them away, doesn’t dare call fire in this building with Kurosaki and Tsuzuki still either inside it or clinging to the outside of it but does call his doves again and has them tear through the mass of spirits, shredding their grip. The windowsill catches him in the back, a different kind of pain-he ignores it and clambers out the window, hoists himself to the roof. The tiles slip and scatter under his hands and feet, and darkness coils around his joints, tries to tug him back inside. He rips free, slaps an ofuda in place, then another. They steam at the edges, moisture evaporating as lightning arcs across them. He jars more tiles loose and hears them shatter; Tsuzuki and Kurosaki stand on the peak of the overhang, a meter or two below him, and start to chant. Subaru sees light sparking from the ofuda Tsuzuki’s managed to plant-he just needs two more, he’s almost at the roof’s peak now-
-hot agony sears into his back but he’s had worse, even if his cheek starts to bleed and burn again-
There. His fingernails find purchase on the peak, anchoring themselves in the grout between the tiles. He pulls himself up to standing, or at least crouching, holds onto the rooftop with one hand and flings the final two ofuda free with the other. The coils snake around his wrists again, but he wrenches them free, clasps his hands together, chants.
“ On sowahanba shuda saraba tamara sowahanba shudo kan... On tatagyato dohanbaya sowaka...”
The spirits shriek in fury, pit their wills against his and push back with all their power, but this, this he knows how to do. Through the winds and pieces of flying tile he sees Tsuzuki's hands on Kurosaki's shoulders, white against the denim; they chant in tandem with Subaru. White lines of energy blaze through the air and connect the ofuda, fence the spirits in and scorch any foolish enough to test its strength. Subaru thinks of the smell of charred dead flesh and doesn’t gag as much as he thought he might.
“On sowahanba shuda saraba tamara sowahanba shudo kan... On tatagyato dohanbaya sowaka...”
The-whatever it is on his back, the wound reopens; blood trickles past his waistband and soaks into his suit, it’s really more sticky than painful and a part of his mind fixes on the fact that it’s his own blood on the suit now and it-hasn’t been, hasn’t been that case in months…
Finish it. It’s time to finish it. He concentrates, and when he calls it forth, the power humming through him makes his teeth chatter.
“On barodaya... sowaka.”
The lines strengthen, solidify, burn. The scent of ozone fills the air, ozone and burnt paper. The kekkai holds; they’ve contained the power. Now to stop it. He feels Tsuzuki and Kurosaki breathe in together, and the three of them chant:
“On boku ken.”
Subaru collapses forward, his forehead skidding across the tiles-he grips the sides of the roof before he topples off it, but he didn’t purify himself before this, he hasn’t prepared anything to deflect the sakanagi. Taking care of that isn’t difficult, far from it, it’s what he knows and what he’s learned how to do, but this-
He wonders what the killer will think if he returns to this place. Perhaps they’ve scared him away permanently, or perhaps they’ve intrigued him, perhaps he’ll want to know what happened here, what caused the disturbance. The latter makes finding him easier, but Subaru still-he knows it will end, that it has to, but he doesn’t know how. His back’s still burning. Our bodies don’t age or die or change, Tsuzuki said; will the wound heal without a trace, then? Will physical injury affect him at all? Or will he wear all the damage he receives until he’s nothing but lesions and scars, red raw skin and dried-no, no, that would mean someone else marked him and Seishirou didn’t want that, Wished for the opposite and that’s fine, if-if Subaru can’t have the right scars, he doesn’t want any at all.
“Are they gone?” Kurosaki asks.
“Not exactly,” Tsuzuki says. “We stopped all the magical energy in this area, but we didn’t get rid of it. They’ll be back. And they won’t be too happy with us, we hit them with a pretty powerful spell…are you all right, Sumeragi-san? Will you be able to get down from the roof?”
“I’m fine,” he replies. It isn’t quite a lie. “And I’ll manage.” He’s jumped farther than this before; he’s no Windcaster, but his body remembers what to do, how to position himself, how to land. Fallen tiles crunch under his shoes. The gash on his back aches but not enough to hospitalize him, he doesn’t think, he just needs bandages and rest and he can obtain the first easily enough. Tsuzuki holds out a hand to Kurosaki, who rebuffs it and leaps off the roof before Tsuzuki can insist. He lands a meter or so from Subaru and crosses his arms, his knuckles spreading and whitening.
“You could have killed me,” Kurosaki says, eyes blazing. “You could have killed all of us, you could have collapsed the building on our heads-”
“I didn’t.” Subaru reaches for a cigarette, for his lighter, for something for his hands to do. “And I wasn’t aware you could kill a shinigami.” He doesn’t need to add so easily.
“No, but you can make it a lot harder for us to do our jobs.”
Subaru flips his lighter open and pauses as the flame flickers. “And what is your job now, Kurosaki-san?”
“I was going to say that our job is the same as yours.” Kurosaki’s eyes narrow. “But I don’t think it is. What do you want to do with the killer, Sumeragi?”
“What I want doesn’t enter into this.”
“What are you going to do, then? If you catch him first?”
“Hisoka!” Tsuzuki jogs over, wipes the back of his hand across his forehead. It comes away streaked with blood.
“You’re hurt,” Kurosaki says.
“It’s just a cut. It looks worse than it is, head wounds bleed a lot. What were you going to tell us back in there? You said you figured something out.”
Kurosaki tugs his jacket open and slides a slim book out from beneath it. Subaru leans closer, squints to read the title and the furigana to the right of the kanji: Under the Cherry Blossom Tree.
Kurosaki flinches when Subaru does.
“Are you okay?” Tsuzuki asks-asks Kurosaki, not Subaru.
“I’m fine. I found this book in the bathroom on the first floor.”
“I guess someone’s grandkid left it there-”
“Look at the reprint date, Tsuzuki.”
He complies; Subaru doesn’t bother.
“1992,” Kurosaki continues. “Almost fifteen years after the hospital closed. A children’s book published eight years ago in a hospital for the age that’s been shut down for decades.”
A child. Subaru realizes it as Tsuzuki does.
He remembers-so much, blood dripping from the sky like rain, splashing on his cheek and sticking to his eyelashes, sakura petals whipping in the wind, winter air sucking the heat from his blood and hers, from the victim’s, air leaking out the hole in her lung in puffs of white and even Seishirou’s hand lodged in her chest can’t prevent the escape-
Another child. Does this move in circles?
“Hisoka-Hisoka,” Tsuzuki’s saying.
Kurosaki hoists himself out of Tsuzuki’s grasp and stands on shaking legs, glaring at Subaru. “What the hell did you-”
“Hisoka, it’s not his fault-”
Isn’t it? Subaru thinks.
“Bullshit,” Kurosaki snaps.
“This is just his job, Hisoka. Just like it’s ours. All right?”
“It’s not all right,” Kurosaki mumbles.
Subaru concurs, takes a long drag on his cigarette. He barely notices the taste anymore.
“We should look into children who’ve disappeared around here,” Tsuzuki says. “Children who’ve been declared dead but don’t appear in Meifu’s records, or children who haven’t been enrolled in school for a long time.”
“Or kids who never got enrolled in the first place.” Kurosaki’s fingers tighten around the book.
“And runaways,” Tsuzuki adds.
Kurosaki gives him a withering stare. “Any kid old enough to run away wouldn’t be reading this kind of book.”
“You never know. Some children get an earlier start on that kind of thing than others. And maybe the book’s more of a keepsake?”
“Sure,” Kurosaki says, “I guess. I wonder why the kid didn’t die…”
“I imagine the spirits here would take well to a child,” Subaru says. “To any visitor. That might be why they didn’t attack us at first; they wanted company.”
Kurosaki snorts.
“I’ll call Tatsumi and ask him to go through the records,” Tsuzuki says, flipping open his cell phone. “I know he has connections in this world, he can look through the records here, too-”
“He can use my security clearance if he wants.” Subaru drops his cigarette to the ground, grinds it under his heel. He hadn’t realized that he’d finished it. “That should give him access to anything he needs.”
“Thanks.” Tsuzuki’s smile flashes in the dark. “I guess Byakko and your shiki can keep an eye or six on this place, just in case the killer tries to come back here.”
And what will the child think when he sees what’s been done? Subaru thinks, but doesn’t say.
Maybe all people who do bad things…are just really lonely.
He closes his eyes.
Have not written magical combat in far too long. Have missed it a lot. Chant stolen from a website that I think stole it from one of the volumes of TB, though I can't recall which one offhand; the spell's supposed to create a powerful kekkai, trap the magical energies within it, then stops them.
...Subaru's laying down the ofuda in the shape of a decagram, by the way. Or two overlapping pentagrams, at least.
And yes, this chapter does have a ton of TB quotes in it. See if you can find them all! (It's, er, not that hard, I used a lot of the fairly famous ones.)