Fic: A Pit With Heaven Over It (YnM, Tsuzuki & Hisoka)
Summary: To stir would be to slip -- To look would be to drop --
AN: Implicit in this story is the huge creative debt I owe Phoebe for her marvelous Hisoka/Muraki stories. No one else has ever been able to sell me on them. So, in a very real way, this story is entirely her fault.
A Pit With Heaven Over It
1.
Anything can be made better with pastries.
Tsuzuki believes this -- the trick is making it work. So instead of thinking about Hisoka bent over dead bodies, lit up with a strange focused intensity, Tsuzuki is standing in front of a glass display case, smudging it up with fingerprints as he points and frets and changes his mind. They all look so good.
Tsuzuki is stepping outside, carrying little pink-and-white boxes, when he sees his reflection in the door: two faces look back, overlapping, distorted. But all he has to do is blink and everything is all right again and the door swings shut with a faint jangle of bells.
It feels like a short walk back to the hotel, under railroad tracks and across the street, but measuring the distance between two points isn't always so easy.
2.
Hisoka is still asleep at the round table they've been using as a desk, autopsy reports spread out under the teacups and empty takeout boxes. Hisoka's jacket pulls back to reveal the prominent knob of his wrist. There's a blood stain on the shirt cuff, right along the edge, ruining the beautiful material. Light fills the room, making Hisoka look almost insubstantial, soft and distant as a memory. There's dried blood under his nails.
Tsuzuki nudges the back of the chair and says, "It's morning."
Hisoka starts awake. Tsuzuki takes a step back, remembering how on the first day they'd met he put Hisoka to bed. It hadn't meant much of anything then.
"You hungry?" he asks as Hisoka yawns.
"No."
"Because I have --"
"Tsuzuki." Hisoka's voice is quietly firm, not even irritated. The rumble of a passing train makes the empty cups jitter, sound rolling through the stillness and leaving it heavier.
3.
It's a short step from a picture of a dead girl to a comfortably worn neighborhood filled with old-fashioned houses, the sort that survived the firebombing. The gate they push open is stubborn and rusty, scrapping along a shallow groove in the walkway. A patch of dark-stemmed bamboo has spread across the yard and there are clumps of grass in the gravel edging.
"Neglect." Tsuzuki hears how deliberately casual his own voice sounds, like long ago when he had to find ways of showing Hisoka what to notice without hurting his pride. He leaves that thought behind, stepping beyond it, and reaches for the doorbell only to pause halfway through the motion.
"Who are we?"
Hisoka shrugs. "Reporters?"
"'Kay."
Inside the bell sounds with faint chimes.
4.
The interview doesn't take long, though it feels like forever. It's still early for lunch, just past eleven, but if Tsuzuki whines long enough he usually gets his way. The restaurant is under new management, which makes Tsuzuki suspicious, but so far the noodles are just the same.
Between mouthfuls Tsuzuki asks, "Did you pick up anything back there?"
Hisoka shakes his head in a way that means he's listening but thinking about something else. Sunlight pulls the color from Hisoka's skin and hair, overexposing the white collar of his shirt. Someone tells a joke and a burst of laughter opens up, filling the tiny room. The waitress calls orders back to the kitchen and all around them conversations flow on top of each other.
At last Hisoka says, "Whatever did this used to be human."
Tsuzuki doesn't ask how he knows.
5.
Just as Hisoka predicts, the EnmaCho databases come up empty.
"The databases aren't as complete as you'd think," Hisoka says, adding something in English that Tsuzuki can't understand, a phrase that sounds like poetry.
After a deceptively short walk they end up in front of a nondescript door in the nice part of town. Hisoka knocks, soft and precise, and the door opens.
The front room is dark and comfortable with worn expensive-looking rugs and furniture that smells faintly of smoke. At the far end of the room is a heavy curtain beside an ornate metal grill. A voice says, "Kurosaki-san," respectfully, and the curtain is drawn aside to reveal a long table of dark wood in a room lined with bookcases.
There's a book waiting for them. Hisoka puts on thin cotton gloves to turn the pages.
"Here." Hisoka's voice is cool and impersonal as he reads about bargaining with gods and demons, the real story drifting up between neat rows of long words, how you always get exactly what you ask for, but it's never what you really want, gifts and curses blurring together until they're almost indistinguishable. "There are several versions of the underlying transgression. Greed. Impiety. Incorrect sacrifices. Seeking forbidden knowledge. The sources vary." Hisoka looks up and there's a speculative quality to his gaze. "Do you know this spell?"
The curves are familiar, a simple messenger, but with long twisting embellishments that turn it into something else. He's seen it before, long ago, but the memory is cloudy, so far away it's fallen out of focus. The easiest answer is a shrug.
"But you could copy it." Something hard and warm moves behind Hisoka's eyes, painfully direct and for a moment focused entirely upon him.
"Probably." Tsuzuki looks away easily, irresistibly, patting down his pockets for stray fuda.
There's something loose and flowing in this kind of magic, stopping just short of carelessness, that Hisoka has never quite mastered. The thin strips of fuda unfold into small white birds that circle the room, waiting for Tsuzuki to ask for anything in their power to give.
All he has to do is ask.
6.
The day unspools, summer wheeling free and open across the sky and then dissolving. The tracking spells circle the city in slowly widening arcs, searching with hard unblinking eyes. All Tsuzuki can do is wait and hope the police don't find any more bodies as the hours drift by. But he knows there are always more dead, one way or another, an endless steady stream.
The evening is luminous and fragile as they cut through an empty park. Tsuzuki's hands are in his pockets as he walks next to Hisoka and talks and talks. He stops as soon as he feels the faint tingle of Hisoka's magic, and all around them birds appear, edges softly smudged, lit from within with moonlight. They spin out, iridescent wings flapping soundlessly. Twilight illumines the silver threads that wind around each in elegant loops and small hard knots. They aren't fuda or any magic Tsuzuki knows: something that was once alive, now held in deathless suspension. It's a beautiful display and for his benefit, a gift of sorts, but Tsuzuki doesn't ask any questions, just watches how the magic's cool reflected glow covers Hisoka's face like a white mask.
Hisoka closes his hands into fists. The birds disappear. Up ahead a streetlight flickers on, filtered through high leafy branches.
Tsuzuki looks up, thinking of grief, of the still houses they visit over and over, and the empty ghost-like people who get left behind. There is no moon tonight. Hisoka is within arm's reach, at Tsuzuki's side as always, and very far away.
7.
There is always a backlog of forms to fill out and old reports to write, stretching back further and further, half-forgotten, but Tsuzuki plays with a ratty old deck of cards instead, building up delicate structures.
Once, by accident, Tsuzuki catches his reflection in the small round mirror hung over a set of drawers. The room is dim, streetlight in pale stripes across the wall behind him, and it isn't his face looking back. If he closes his eyes, someone is standing directly behind him, pressed up against his skin, warm breath in his ear like a ceaseless whisper. He knows he is going to dream again tonight, everything burning, a white expanse of bone rushing up to met a blood red sky, the world depthless and intoxicating, breaking apart with possibilities. He can taste --
Tsuzuki opens his eyes. No one's there.
He blinks again and Hisoka is on the other side of the desk, silent and intensely self-contained as he fills out one of the new lime green expense cards, gathering together the day's receipts in a neat stack. Tsuzuki's hands are cold. He feels lightheaded, almost weightless, and for a moment entirely unreal. The spreading circle of lamp light turns Hisoka's hair from light brown to gold and makes his pale skin look warm. There's a fineness to Hisoka's profile that makes Tsuzuki think of steel folded over and over, heated and hammered down to a keen, bright edge.
If he waits, everything will be all right again, the whisper fading into noise on the street, the sound of a distant train, unknown people moving on the other side of thin walls. Tsuzuki adds another card to the carefully balanced structure.
0.
When Hisoka gets up in the middle of the night and vanishes, Tsuzuki pretends not to hear because Hisoka is always there again when he wakes up, in the room's other bed or asleep at the round table they've been using as a desk.
But maybe Hisoka doesn't leave. Maybe it's all just a dream that creeps into his room each night -- the soft sounds of Hisoka sliding out of bed, the stillness as he disappears -- just a dream.
Tsuzuki believes this.
The trick is making it work.
AN: Implicit in this story is the huge creative debt I owe Phoebe for her marvelous Hisoka/Muraki stories. No one else has ever been able to sell me on them. So, in a very real way, this story is entirely her fault.
A Pit With Heaven Over It
1.
Anything can be made better with pastries.
Tsuzuki believes this -- the trick is making it work. So instead of thinking about Hisoka bent over dead bodies, lit up with a strange focused intensity, Tsuzuki is standing in front of a glass display case, smudging it up with fingerprints as he points and frets and changes his mind. They all look so good.
Tsuzuki is stepping outside, carrying little pink-and-white boxes, when he sees his reflection in the door: two faces look back, overlapping, distorted. But all he has to do is blink and everything is all right again and the door swings shut with a faint jangle of bells.
It feels like a short walk back to the hotel, under railroad tracks and across the street, but measuring the distance between two points isn't always so easy.
2.
Hisoka is still asleep at the round table they've been using as a desk, autopsy reports spread out under the teacups and empty takeout boxes. Hisoka's jacket pulls back to reveal the prominent knob of his wrist. There's a blood stain on the shirt cuff, right along the edge, ruining the beautiful material. Light fills the room, making Hisoka look almost insubstantial, soft and distant as a memory. There's dried blood under his nails.
Tsuzuki nudges the back of the chair and says, "It's morning."
Hisoka starts awake. Tsuzuki takes a step back, remembering how on the first day they'd met he put Hisoka to bed. It hadn't meant much of anything then.
"You hungry?" he asks as Hisoka yawns.
"No."
"Because I have --"
"Tsuzuki." Hisoka's voice is quietly firm, not even irritated. The rumble of a passing train makes the empty cups jitter, sound rolling through the stillness and leaving it heavier.
3.
It's a short step from a picture of a dead girl to a comfortably worn neighborhood filled with old-fashioned houses, the sort that survived the firebombing. The gate they push open is stubborn and rusty, scrapping along a shallow groove in the walkway. A patch of dark-stemmed bamboo has spread across the yard and there are clumps of grass in the gravel edging.
"Neglect." Tsuzuki hears how deliberately casual his own voice sounds, like long ago when he had to find ways of showing Hisoka what to notice without hurting his pride. He leaves that thought behind, stepping beyond it, and reaches for the doorbell only to pause halfway through the motion.
"Who are we?"
Hisoka shrugs. "Reporters?"
"'Kay."
Inside the bell sounds with faint chimes.
4.
The interview doesn't take long, though it feels like forever. It's still early for lunch, just past eleven, but if Tsuzuki whines long enough he usually gets his way. The restaurant is under new management, which makes Tsuzuki suspicious, but so far the noodles are just the same.
Between mouthfuls Tsuzuki asks, "Did you pick up anything back there?"
Hisoka shakes his head in a way that means he's listening but thinking about something else. Sunlight pulls the color from Hisoka's skin and hair, overexposing the white collar of his shirt. Someone tells a joke and a burst of laughter opens up, filling the tiny room. The waitress calls orders back to the kitchen and all around them conversations flow on top of each other.
At last Hisoka says, "Whatever did this used to be human."
Tsuzuki doesn't ask how he knows.
5.
Just as Hisoka predicts, the EnmaCho databases come up empty.
"The databases aren't as complete as you'd think," Hisoka says, adding something in English that Tsuzuki can't understand, a phrase that sounds like poetry.
After a deceptively short walk they end up in front of a nondescript door in the nice part of town. Hisoka knocks, soft and precise, and the door opens.
The front room is dark and comfortable with worn expensive-looking rugs and furniture that smells faintly of smoke. At the far end of the room is a heavy curtain beside an ornate metal grill. A voice says, "Kurosaki-san," respectfully, and the curtain is drawn aside to reveal a long table of dark wood in a room lined with bookcases.
There's a book waiting for them. Hisoka puts on thin cotton gloves to turn the pages.
"Here." Hisoka's voice is cool and impersonal as he reads about bargaining with gods and demons, the real story drifting up between neat rows of long words, how you always get exactly what you ask for, but it's never what you really want, gifts and curses blurring together until they're almost indistinguishable. "There are several versions of the underlying transgression. Greed. Impiety. Incorrect sacrifices. Seeking forbidden knowledge. The sources vary." Hisoka looks up and there's a speculative quality to his gaze. "Do you know this spell?"
The curves are familiar, a simple messenger, but with long twisting embellishments that turn it into something else. He's seen it before, long ago, but the memory is cloudy, so far away it's fallen out of focus. The easiest answer is a shrug.
"But you could copy it." Something hard and warm moves behind Hisoka's eyes, painfully direct and for a moment focused entirely upon him.
"Probably." Tsuzuki looks away easily, irresistibly, patting down his pockets for stray fuda.
There's something loose and flowing in this kind of magic, stopping just short of carelessness, that Hisoka has never quite mastered. The thin strips of fuda unfold into small white birds that circle the room, waiting for Tsuzuki to ask for anything in their power to give.
All he has to do is ask.
6.
The day unspools, summer wheeling free and open across the sky and then dissolving. The tracking spells circle the city in slowly widening arcs, searching with hard unblinking eyes. All Tsuzuki can do is wait and hope the police don't find any more bodies as the hours drift by. But he knows there are always more dead, one way or another, an endless steady stream.
The evening is luminous and fragile as they cut through an empty park. Tsuzuki's hands are in his pockets as he walks next to Hisoka and talks and talks. He stops as soon as he feels the faint tingle of Hisoka's magic, and all around them birds appear, edges softly smudged, lit from within with moonlight. They spin out, iridescent wings flapping soundlessly. Twilight illumines the silver threads that wind around each in elegant loops and small hard knots. They aren't fuda or any magic Tsuzuki knows: something that was once alive, now held in deathless suspension. It's a beautiful display and for his benefit, a gift of sorts, but Tsuzuki doesn't ask any questions, just watches how the magic's cool reflected glow covers Hisoka's face like a white mask.
Hisoka closes his hands into fists. The birds disappear. Up ahead a streetlight flickers on, filtered through high leafy branches.
Tsuzuki looks up, thinking of grief, of the still houses they visit over and over, and the empty ghost-like people who get left behind. There is no moon tonight. Hisoka is within arm's reach, at Tsuzuki's side as always, and very far away.
7.
There is always a backlog of forms to fill out and old reports to write, stretching back further and further, half-forgotten, but Tsuzuki plays with a ratty old deck of cards instead, building up delicate structures.
Once, by accident, Tsuzuki catches his reflection in the small round mirror hung over a set of drawers. The room is dim, streetlight in pale stripes across the wall behind him, and it isn't his face looking back. If he closes his eyes, someone is standing directly behind him, pressed up against his skin, warm breath in his ear like a ceaseless whisper. He knows he is going to dream again tonight, everything burning, a white expanse of bone rushing up to met a blood red sky, the world depthless and intoxicating, breaking apart with possibilities. He can taste --
Tsuzuki opens his eyes. No one's there.
He blinks again and Hisoka is on the other side of the desk, silent and intensely self-contained as he fills out one of the new lime green expense cards, gathering together the day's receipts in a neat stack. Tsuzuki's hands are cold. He feels lightheaded, almost weightless, and for a moment entirely unreal. The spreading circle of lamp light turns Hisoka's hair from light brown to gold and makes his pale skin look warm. There's a fineness to Hisoka's profile that makes Tsuzuki think of steel folded over and over, heated and hammered down to a keen, bright edge.
If he waits, everything will be all right again, the whisper fading into noise on the street, the sound of a distant train, unknown people moving on the other side of thin walls. Tsuzuki adds another card to the carefully balanced structure.
0.
When Hisoka gets up in the middle of the night and vanishes, Tsuzuki pretends not to hear because Hisoka is always there again when he wakes up, in the room's other bed or asleep at the round table they've been using as a desk.
But maybe Hisoka doesn't leave. Maybe it's all just a dream that creeps into his room each night -- the soft sounds of Hisoka sliding out of bed, the stillness as he disappears -- just a dream.
Tsuzuki believes this.
The trick is making it work.