memento mori, Chapter Two (X/Yami no Matsuei, Subaru, Tsuzuki, Hisoka)
I said weekly update schedule, and I'm going to stick to that, dammit.
And thanks so much to everyone who read the first part. Your encouragement means a lot, it really does. *smooshes you all*
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG-13 for this chapter, R for later ones. 5106 words in this chapter, 9480 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
chapter two: You can't let other people tell you who you are, Hisoka says. Subaru disagrees.
08.12.2000
Subaru steps back from the prone young man before him; his companion darts forward and scoops him up, rests him in the chair Subaru vacated, props his head up carefully with a stolen pillow and keeps one eye fixed on Subaru the entire time. Subaru holds his hand in front of his face, fingers pointed up, and concentrates-powerful, clearly, he surmised as much when they broke through his wards, but their spiritual power isn’t malignant, doesn’t bear the seeds of ill intent. The absence of life in both of the visitors glares almost as brightly in his sight as their power does.
“You’re shinigami, aren’t you?” he asks.
The man in the black coat nods, smooths his partner’s bangs away from his eyes and straightens. “And you’re an onmyouji. Well, I guessed that much as soon as you went Within,” he adds, deceptively casual, “it’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it?” He slips another ofuda out of his pocket. “I’ll ask again. What did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Subaru says, because it’s true. “I’m assuming it isn’t sakanagi, as I didn’t feel him cast anything. It might be a different form of backlash from another power he attempted to use on me, if he has other abilities.”
“He’s an empath,” the man says, “but he can’t control it very well-wait, he touched you, didn’t he?” Some of the tension eases out of the man’s frame; his shoulders slouch forward as he jams his hands into his pockets.
“I believe he did.” Subaru straightens. “I can attempt to wake him up, but if he reacts this adversely to my presence…”
“Thanks, but-yeah, don’t. He must have seen something when he touched you.” The man grins awkwardly, clicks his tongue against his teeth. “I can’t even imagine what, if whatever he saw was strong enough to knock him out like this. What kind of onmyouji are you?”
“The thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan,” Subaru says. Again the truth, or part of it. “Sumeragi Subaru.” He bows, perhaps perfunctorily, but the man doesn’t seem to mind, or at the very least raises no objections.
“Well, that explains why breaking the wards on this place made me so dizzy,” the man says. “I’m Tsuzuki Asato.” He returns the bow, reaches forward and rumples the young man’s hair; the young man stirs and twitches slightly as though he’s trying to shake the touch off. “That’s Kurosaki Hisoka. We work for the Second Division of Enma-cho, in the Shokan department.”
“The murders have Meifu’s attention, then?” he asks, more out of professional courtesy than anything else.
“Well,” Tsuzuki says, “we’re usually good about not misplacing people, and it’s even worse when we can’t find their souls anywhere, so it’s getting a little troublesome.”
“I understand.”
“You didn’t sense his soul, did you?” Tsuzuki asks. “When you went Within?”
Subaru shakes his head slightly. “I couldn’t sense his consciousness. He didn’t retreat, he vanished.”
“That’s what we were worried about,” Tsuzuki says. “It’s kind of scary to think of something capable of doing something like that running around in Nagasaki.” He shivers-theatrically? The gesture looks exaggerated, almost too playful-and frowns. “I didn’t know this fell under the Sumeragi’s jurisdiction.”
“If it concerns the intrusion of the spiritual into the realm of the material, I suppose it does,” he says. Enma-daioh and his grandmother can discuss matters of jurisdiction if they so wish, and define spirituality and reality versus living and dead, and decide how a shinigami’s responsibilities differ from an onmyouji’s, and guard what they perceive to be their respective domains, but the delicate balance between what the Sumeragi’s duties require and what Meifu’s rule permits doesn’t concern him now. He isn’t investigating this on behalf of the Sumeragi.
Tsuzuki doesn’t seem inclined to press the point, and Subaru supposes he’s grateful for that. “No, no, you’re probably right,” he says, adding with a sigh, “The Chief never tells me anything. I remember the first case Hisoka and I worked on together-we didn’t realize we were partners until after he pulled a gun on me.”
“Oh,” Subaru says, half-listening.
“It was a fake gun, though. Hisoka doesn’t like to use weapons. Well, not modern ones, at least; he’s really good at archery, and I think he knows kendo, too-Tatsumi says he does, but I’ve never seen him practice.”
Subaru acknowledges him with an “Mm.”
“He’s a tough kid, though,” Tsuzuki continues. “And he isn’t really a kid anymore, either. Sometimes you forget that when you look at him.”
“How long will he remain unconscious?”
Tsuzuki shrugs. “It’s hard to say. His body’s kind of weak. He heals fast from physical wounds, but he doesn’t recover as well from other things-he has no tolerance for alcohol, and his stamina’s never been great. But since whatever you did to him hit his mind, I think he’ll recover in a few hours. He’s stubborn like that.” Tsuzuki’s brow creases, dims the force of his smile. “I mean, it doesn’t feel like he’s gone Within…”
Subaru kneels next to the young man-Kurosaki-and sends out part of his consciousness, drifts just above the surface of Kurosaki’s mind. His dreams don’t seem to have turned inward, and when Subaru tries to slide in deeper, Kurosaki pushes back, thrusts him as far away as he can. Not retreat, then, but recovery, a chance to reassemble his defenses, and from the feel of it they’re repairing themselves quickly. Subaru’s eyes snap open as his temples start to twinge. “He hasn’t,” he says. “You’re familiar with the condition?”
“Yeah.” Tsuzuki’s smile hangs listlessly on his face. “Well, as long as we’re working on the same case-I don’t know the Sumeragi’s policy on this, and I’m not entirely sure what Enma-daioh’s is, either-but it makes sense to share what we know, doesn’t it? I know things have been, well…”
“Strained,” Subaru supplies.
“Exactly. Strained between your family and Enma-cho, but we both want the same thing, don’t we? Or close enough to it.”
“I want this case to be resolved,” Subaru says. And then he’ll move on to his next assignment, and his next, whether his instructions come from the Sumeragi’s cell phone or the Sakurazukamori’s. He wonders what the distinction between them is; his function changes depending on who calls, yes, but a role is only that, a trapping, an illusion. Beneath that, what changes? What is there?
Will he get better at crafting illusions? He will, he supposes, if he’s expected to. He’ll be who he has to, what he has to. Who does Tsuzuki expect him to be?
Tsuzuki’s nodding. “So do I.” He perches on the edge of Matsumoto’s bed, a good distance away from the man himself. “It never really ends, does it?”
“No,” Subaru says. “It doesn’t.”
Silence stretches between them. Tsuzuki’s violet eyes catch the light sparkling from the surface of the bay. “Where are you going after this?” he asks.
“They found Matsumoto-san in Saikai,” Subaru says, “and he appears to be the first victim. I’ll start there.”
“Right. Hisoka and I might run into you there. We’re going to go to Nagasaki proper first, though. The Gushoshin think the killer’s headed there next.”
“You haven’t detected a pattern?” he asks.
“No. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but it looks really random so far.” He swings himself off the bed and bends over Kurosaki, scooping the young man up into his arms. “Which means the killer’s experimenting, or-” He hesitates.
“Or?”
“Or the killer’s not sure what he’s doing, or can’t control what he’s doing. He’s acting on instinct, killing anyone who crosses his path.”
Subaru nods in what he thinks is a suitably grave fashion, but the motive doesn’t change the outcome, not on the killer’s part and not on his. What drives a person to kill? He can answer for himself, but he can’t answer for anyone else.
“We’ll run into each other again, I think,” Tsuzuki says. “I’ll keep Hisoka from touching you when we do.” He pauses at the door, half-pivots on his heel and cranes his neck to get a better look at Subaru. “Either he didn’t understand what he saw, or he understood it too well.”
“I can’t say,” Subaru says. “I don’t know him.”
***
-the blood tints the petals pink-
“-Hisoka?”
Slowly, Hisoka pries his eyes open. His vision stays fogged over for a while, blurred and hazy from sleep. Tsuzuki, or a fuzzy silhouette in black that looks a lot like him, hovers over his bedside, his hand not-quite-touching Hisoka’s.
“Mmf,” Hisoka says, and coughs to clear his throat. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“See what?”
“Why there’s so much sakura in Meifu.” He rolls his shoulders back, listens to the pop and scrape of bone. “They signify death, don’t they?” No, not signify, that’s not the right word. “They are death,” he corrects. “There are corpses buried under them.”
Tsuzuki leans forward and braces the heels of his palms against the edge of the bed, presses down hard enough to tug the sheets loose. “Where did you see that?” he asks, then: “Was it after you touched that man?”
Hisoka nods. “Yeah. He-”
Tsuzuki springs up and pulls his coat over his shoulders before Hisoka finishes speaking.
“Tsuzuki,” he says. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I just have to check with the Gushoshin about something.” He dashes to the doorway and hops into his boots, tugs the laces tight. “I’ll be back in a few hours, five at most. I’ll meet you at Urakami Station if you’re feeling well enough to get out of bed, okay?”
“I’m fine,” Hisoka snaps, more out of reflex than anything else. “What’s wrong?”
“You know,” Tsuzuki says, “I have no idea. Just a hunch. It might be nothing.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Kind of. It’s hard to explain, I don’t know how much you know about the old clans-”
“A lot,” Hisoka says. “The Kurosaki are one of them, remember?”
Tsuzuki pauses, one boot half-laced and one boot still untied. “Oh. Right. Sorry about that.”
“You’re such an idiot.” Hisoka grunts and pushes himself upright until he’s sitting; borrowed blood drains away from his head and leaves him dizzy for a few seconds, but that clears soon enough. “Which clan?”
“The Sumeragi,” Tsuzuki says, and pauses. “And the Sakurazuka.”
Hisoka racks his mind for what he knows about them. The Sumeragi are obvious: advisors and defenders, leaders of the onmyouji, Japan’s spiritual protectors for centuries.
They’re entwined with the Sakurazuka, who-practice dark onmyoujutsu, that makes sense, there has to be a light side and a dark side and it’s clear which one the Sumeragi fall under. Sakurazukamori, the legend started getting popular again just before Hisoka died, the assassin in the shadows-
-guardian of the sakura barrow, that’s what the name means. Of course. Tsuzuki’s not the only moron in the room.
“You think that man was the Sakurazukamori?” Hisoka asks.
“I don’t know,” Tsuzuki says. “But he called himself the Sumeragi.”
“Oh.” Shit.
“Officially, we just sort of let the Sakurazukamori go after his targets. Or her targets, the last one I met was a woman. But he’s dangerous, whoever he is. He has to be, to kill the kind of people he does.”
“Who does he kill?” Hisoka asks.
“People too dangerous for the government to leave alive.”
“So he’s like us,” Hisoka says.
Tsuzuki’s laces fall from his hands and clatter against the sides of his boots. “Yeah, I guess you can say that. Whoops, dropped these.” He pulls the laces tight, and Hisoka can hear the sound of the leather straining, the grommets squeaking. “Hisoka-”
Hisoka knows what he’s going to say before he says it. He doesn’t even need empathy for that trick. “If you ask me how I’m feeling one more time,” he says, “I’ll hit you.”
Tsuzuki holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I give in. If you aren’t here, I’ll look for you by Urakami Station, all right?”
“Yeah, fine.” He pauses. “Tsuzuki?”
“Hm?”
“What do you think he’s after?”
Tsuzuki finishes knotting his laces and stands. “The same thing we are,” he says. “On the surface, anyway. Other than that, I don’t know.”
Hisoka spends about ten minutes in bed rubbing his eyes and reorienting himself before he slips on his shoes and heads out the door. Like hell he’s waiting around in the room for hours. He might be able to get some work done while Tsuzuki’s away; the killer’s probably reached Nagasaki by now, and he might be able to sense a malicious presence stalking the streets, might be able to detect fluctuations in spiritual power. It’s better than sitting in bed and watching game shows until Tsuzuki gets back.
He takes the tram to Nagasakieki-mae, walks to Nagasaki Station, takes the JR Nagasaki line to Urakami Station, and arrives with hours to kill before he’s supposed to meet Tsuzuki. He extends his senses as far as he dares at a train station-it’s easy to get overwhelmed here, crushed by hundreds of minds milling around-but pulls back when he senses something cold and silent to the north, a place his power curls away from. It fills his ears with eerie flat ringing, distant echoes of long-lost sounds. He glances at a map mounted on the wall of one of the platforms and calculates. North of here, that’s-
-the Nagasaki Peace Park. Right. He rubs the back of his head. Tsuzuki said the place was cleansed long ago, but it feels like they purged everything from it when they cleaned up. No pain, no joy, no life, no death, just flatness and faint reflections.
Unless. Unless the cleansing aura over that place purges anyone who enters or at least masks their presence, because there have to be visitors in the park now, and he can’t sense them either. He’s not experienced enough to pick out individual threads of power kilometers away, but he should be able to get some general sense of the place, even if it’s just the impression that the only people there are ordinary humans. And if that’s the case, then the aura must be a good shield for anyone trying to evade detection.
Hisoka’s sneakers thud against the concrete. The tram’s almost ready to pull out of Urakamieki-mae when he arrives, so he sprints the last few meters and skids to a halt in front of the door, bolts through it, and disembarks at Matsuyama-machi.
Up the stone steps at the entranceway-tomorrow his legs will hate him for this-and down the shallower steps to the Peace Fountain at the park’s southern end. His footsteps echo flatly in the basin; not many bodies are around to absorb the sound. The park’s not crowded today, the anniversary of the bombing was three days ago and the people have mostly cleared out since then, don’t want to stay any longer than they have to. The water shoots up in high columns, ringing a black plaque in the center of the pool. Droplets of water spray across Hisoka’s face and mingle with the sweat on his forehead. There are three other visitors to the fountain: a mother clutching her child’s hand and feeding him a sweet, and a man in a long brown coat.
Do you like the sakura?
Hisoka steps closer, braces himself against the lingering scent. “You’re here,” he says, softly enough that the mother and child won’t hear.
The Sumeragi (or is it the Sakurazukamori?) turns, regards him with the green eye first and then the gold one. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Work.”
Hisoka folds his arms over his chest. “Whose work?”
“My own.” The Sumeragi trails his thumb over the seam of his glove.
“And who are you?” Hisoka plants his feet on the concrete, tries to stare the Sumeragi down but he’s not tall enough and the man doesn’t seem to be looking at Hisoka but through him.
“Your partner introduced us,” he says. “Though I don’t think you were conscious at the time.”
Hisoka snorts. “He probably got something wrong.”
“Then I suppose I should make your acquaintance again,” the Sumeragi says, and bows. “Sumeragi Subaru.”
“Kurosaki Hisoka. Is that the only name you go by?”
“No.”
the wind drowns out the rest, shrieks through the petals and whips them around until only the smile’s clear, only the smile pierces the flurry
Hisoka jerks backwards.
Sumeragi-Hisoka mentally drops the “the” prefix-doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown, doesn’t blink. “I should apologize for what happened yesterday.”
“You didn’t know,” Hisoka says, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Sumeragi inclines his head, not assenting but not dissenting either. “Your partner told me that you’re an empath.”
Do most of them run screaming from you? he wants to ask, but doesn’t. Yet. The mother and child ascend the steps; now that Hisoka’s in the park, his senses sharpen enough to see vague shapes of emotions through the static the place creates. It’s counterintuitive, the aura should be even stronger now that he’s in the park, strong enough to cancel out his power, but sometimes you can see things better when you’re closer to them, he guesses, or maybe the aura’s like tinted glass, transparent from the inside but opaque from the outside. Either way, he senses dim wisps of peace circling the mother and child and billowing from them in soft ripples.
Darker echoes cut across them-
his hands burn, inverted stars seared into his skin, steam rising from them and melting the snowflakes falling around him
with this I mark you as my prey
He wrenches his senses away from Sumeragi and pulls them back into himself.
“Can you control it?” Sumeragi asks quietly.
Hisoka’s hands curl into fists in his pockets. “Yes,” he lies. But he’s getting better at it, he knows that he is even if better still isn’t good enough, he doesn’t clutch his head and shake and twitch in crowds anymore and he hasn’t confused other people’s emotions for his own in years and he can even touch now, he can touch Tsuzuki and it doesn’t hurt. This man, whoever he really is, has no right to make Hisoka hurt. “Most of the time. Your magic might not mix well with mine. It’s probably just that.”
“If you like,” Sumeragi says, which isn’t a yes or a no.
“I don’t.” Hisoka pivots on his heel, meets Sumeragi’s mismatched eyes dead on. “But I’m dealing with it.” He scuffs his heel against the slick stones. It skids more than he wanted it to. “Why are you here?”
Sumeragi looks away first. “It’s quiet. Clean. Empty.”
“Is it really?” Hisoka asks.
“It gives the illusion of it.”
“But that’s not real.” Hisoka can’t even pick out the threads in the snarl of emotions wrapped tight somewhere deep inside Sumeragi, it’s just sharp stabs of pain punctuating something even darker, something that makes his stomach knot and churn when he thinks about it. This is the man responsible for Japan’s spiritual purity? “It’s not really like that. Now that this place isn’t stopping me from looking inside, I can feel things…” Whispers in the ground shake the gravel, shift it under his feet; nothing big enough to be an earthquake or even a tremor but enough of a presence to ride under the surface of his consciousness, or just above it.
“Sometimes,” Sumeragi says, “it’s easier to sustain the illusion.” He takes a cigarette from his pocket, lights it and keeps his gloves on in the process, brown leather scraping across the gear of his lighter. He breathes in softly, lets the smoke curl around his fingertips. His eyes lid, but not in pleasure, Hisoka doesn’t think-or feel, for that matter, though looking any deeper into Sumeragi’s heart than he already does without making an effort at it is-
cloth seals the sight of the brands away, but it’s a flimsy barrier at best, you can’t hide forever and he doesn’t
-asking for trouble.
“How long have you been doing that?” Hisoka asks.
Sumeragi looks down at his cigarette; ashes flake from the glowing end, and a few drift down and land on the rippling water. “Years. I started when I was seventeen.”
“You know that’s going to kill you someday,” he says.
“It might,” Sumeragi concedes, inhaling again. Thin columns of smoke trail through the air and mingle with the mist rising from the fountain. Hisoka listens to the water splash into the basin for what feels like minutes on end, watches his reflection ripple and churn and distort.
Distort. Everything about this place distorts. Cleaning is another way of masking, concealing the evidence, he thought as much when he entered the park. But things are clearer inside the wards.
He looks at Sumeragi’s choppy reflection shimmering in the water and draws in a breath. “Did you kill them?” he finally asks.
Sumeragi glances up, his cigarette pinched tightly between the joints of his fingers.
“You have the power to do it,” Hisoka says. Sumeragi doesn’t deny the fact, because there’s false modesty and then there’s idiocy and downplaying the magnitude of his power in this situation falls under the latter category. “Did you?”
“No,” Sumeragi says. He drops his cigarette to the stones and grinds it out. “Their deaths are my responsibility, but I didn’t cause them.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Sumeragi looks out over the water. “I can’t force you to believe me.”
A thrill races through Hisoka’s stomach. “You could let me read you.”
“I believe you already tried that.” He doesn’t add in the part about Hisoka getting knocked unconscious, doesn’t need to. “If the results didn’t satisfy you then, I doubt they would now.”
The bones in Hisoka’s hands shift, tighten, grind together, and Sumeragi still won’t look at him, won’t deign to turn his head Hisoka’s way. “I know what to look for now,” he says.
This time, for the first time, Sumeragi meets Hisoka’s eyes. The green one catches the afternoon light cascading over the water and absorbs some of its quality (the light’s quality, not the water’s, his eyes reflect water but don’t have any of the actual substance in it, so he’s not in danger of crying), threatening to overflow but never spilling. The golden one remains detached, distant. “Do you want to look?”
“Why, what will I find?”
Something siphons the light away. Sumeragi looks down.
“If you don’t answer,” Hisoka says, “it just makes you look guiltier.”
“Justice doesn’t work on those principles, Kurosaki-san.”
“Your justice doesn’t. Meifu doesn’t need you to confess and secure your conviction.”
“Then how do you plan to prove my guilt?” Sumeragi asks.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, Hisoka almost retorts. And a murderer like the Sakurazukamori would know how to clean up after himself. But he’s a detective, not a lawyer, and he can leave the bureaucratic headaches to another department. “I don’t have to. My job’s to bring you in.”
Sumeragi sighs. “You have the wrong suspect.”
“We found you over Matsumoto-san’s body,” Hisoka shoots back.
“He was comatose for over a week before I arrived,” Sumeragi says.
“Maybe you arrived earlier than you said you did.” Hisoka plants his feet down as firmly as he can, even if he doesn’t have much traction on these stones. “Maybe we walked in on you erasing the evidence. You almost sent me Within. What’s to say you didn’t make Matsumoto-san like that in the first place? But then you left something behind,” he continues, he’s on a roll now, “something we could trace back to you, so you pretended to be the Sumeragi to get access to Matsumoto-san and took care of it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t what?” Hisoka snaps. He tunes into the ebb and flow of power in the park. Sumeragi, or whoever he really is, doesn’t appear to be drawing anything into himself or laying down a spell or readying to attack-which is good, Hisoka thinks, because he’s trying to remember if Konoe or Tsuzuki taught him how to stop an onmyouji from banishing him and he’s not sure if either of them ever did. He inches closer to the fountain, his back to the water. He slips his hand into his pocket and grips one of his ofuda, but can he match Sumeragi at onmyoujutsu? If Tsuzuki was here, the two of them might, the two of them probably could if Tsuzuki brought out his shiki, but Tsuzuki’s not here and Hisoka doesn’t have shikigami and if Sumeragi attacks he’ll have to think of something, draw power from somewhere. “What didn’t you do?” Maybe if he gets Sumeragi to talk…even if Sumeragi’s barely said more than two sentences in a row so far, there must be something, something that’ll make him react and if he’s talking he might be distracted enough for Hisoka to get the upper hand for a while.
“I didn’t almost send you Within,” Sumeragi says. “I didn’t sense that you wanted to retreat from the world. You’re-” He hesitates. “You’re stronger than that.”
Oh. Hisoka opens and closes his mouth a few times, then says, “You can’t do anything when you hide from the world. You’re worse than useless. You’re a burden.”
Sumeragi inclines his head. “You’re right.”
Enough. Enough of this man’s silence and deference, enough of evasions and niceties and half-truths and concessions. Stop pretending like you’re interested, Hisoka wants to shout. Stop pretending like you understand. “Being self-effacing doesn’t make you any nobler,” he says. It doesn’t make you better than me.
“I never said that it did,” Sumeragi says. “And I wouldn’t call myself noble.”
Sometimes Hisoka really hates the standard Japanese forms of politeness. “Look, one way or another,” whether you’re Sumeragi or Sakurazuka, he adds silently, “you’re the most powerful onmyouji in Japan. You know it, I know it. So you don’t have to pretend to be anything else.”
Sumeragi trails his fingers through the jet of water closest to him; it pools in the palm of his hand, drips down his fingers, and almost hisses as it falls back into the basin. “What do you want to know?” he asks.
Hisoka’s fingers finally unclench around the ofuda. “Are you really Sumeragi Subaru?”
“Yes.” Sumeragi looks as though he might elaborate, as though yes has more meanings than just the one, but stops himself. “I am.”
“And you’re the thirteenth head of your clan.”
A slight pause. Hisoka makes a note of his hesitation. “Yes,” Sumeragi says.
“Then why are there so many sakura barrows in your memories?”
Sumeragi flinches, draws his fingers out of the water and rubs his hand like he’s trying to return sensation to it.
Hisoka presses on. “What’s your connection to the Sakurazukamori?”
Before Sumeragi responds, a young couple walks down the steps to the fountain, their hands twined together. The woman stands on her tiptoes to whisper something in the man’s ear, something that makes him smile and kiss her cheek. They pause briefly before the fountain; Hisoka jerks his gaze towards the water so it doesn’t look like he was staring and watches their reflections instead of them. The woman closes her eyes, mouth moving in silent prayer, though the way the water ripples foils Hisoka’s attempts to read her lips. She nods once to the man, and they move away from the fountain until their reflections vanish.
He doesn’t know if comforting is the right adjective for it, but it’s something to consider.
“I told you I had more than one name,” Sumeragi says, speaking into the water.
“Yeah. I remember.”
“My other name is Sakurazuka.”
Two faces. Two eyes. Hisoka backs away, circles the rim of the fountain. “Who are you?” he asks.
“I am-” Sumeragi’s voice doesn’t break, but there’s a flat hollow echo to it, one that stretches out to encompass the entire basin and the pathway leading to the Peace Statue and goes on and on and on beyond even that. “I am what I’ve been made to be.”
“That’s…” Hisoka shakes his head, but the words still won’t come out the way he wants them to. He’s wrong, though, he has to be, he’s-other people can’t make you-
The curse stirs slowly under his skin, starts to prickle and set his hairs on end. Don’t you dare, he tells it, gritting his teeth, don’t you fucking dare. “You’re wrong,” he tells Sumeragi. “You can’t-you can’t let other people do that to you. You can’t let them tell you who you are.”
Sumeragi looks at Hisoka’s arms, or the few centimeters of them that aren’t covered by his jacket. It’s really too warm to wear one, but he’d feel worse without the sleeves. He holds his index and middle fingers in front of his face, his eyes half-lidded. Does he see the curse? Hisoka crosses his arms over his chest, but that’s not enough to hide from magical sight. “Stop that,” he says.
Is that-is that envy flaring up behind Sumeragi’s eyes?
Hisoka’s breast pocket vibrates. Arumikan no marui en o mashikaku ni orinagara…
Wait, since when the hell does he have Love Me as his ringtone? He sighs. Watari’s fault, probably. Definitely not Hisoka’s doing, he hates the damn song. He checks the caller ID: Tsuzuki.
“Did you find anything?” he asks.
“Yeah, actually,” Tsuzuki says. He sounds a little out-of-breath. He didn’t blow up the library again, did he? “Listen, are you at Urakami Station?”
“I’m close,” he says. “Matsuyama-machi. The Nagasaki Peace Park.”
“Try to get over there soon, all right?”
“Why, am I late?”
“No, you’re not late,” Tsuzuki says. “But we found another body in Saikai.”
Shit. Saikai? Is the killer retracing his steps and not going into Nagasaki proper like they thought he would? “I’ll be there soon.” He clicks the phone shut.
“Someone else died,” he tells Sumeragi. “We were standing around and talking, and someone else died. Come on.”
“Do you want my assistance?” Sumeragi asks.
“Not really,” Hisoka says honestly. “But for now it looks like you have an alibi.” And if Sumeragi comes with him, it’ll be easier for Hisoka to keep an eye on him. Hisoka might not quite know how to catch an onmyouji in the act, but Tsuzuki will.
Sumeragi nods slowly and shakes the last few drops of water from his fingertips. They sparkle in the reddening light before they sink back into the fountain.
--
So much research, oh my god. The Sumeragi/Meifu polite tension is entirely my invention -- it's analogous to the way different law enforcement agencies try to one-up each other, but a lot more passive-aggressive. "Love Me" is the Yami no Matsuei ending theme, and I get the feeling that it's not exactly Hisoka's kind of song.
And yes, I did imply that Tsuzuki met Setsuka. That's a side story at some point, I think.
And thanks so much to everyone who read the first part. Your encouragement means a lot, it really does. *smooshes you all*
memento mori. X/Yami no Matsuei crossover, Subaru, Tsuzuki, and Hisoka. PG-13 for this chapter, R for later ones. 5106 words in this chapter, 9480 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
chapter two: You can't let other people tell you who you are, Hisoka says. Subaru disagrees.
08.12.2000
Subaru steps back from the prone young man before him; his companion darts forward and scoops him up, rests him in the chair Subaru vacated, props his head up carefully with a stolen pillow and keeps one eye fixed on Subaru the entire time. Subaru holds his hand in front of his face, fingers pointed up, and concentrates-powerful, clearly, he surmised as much when they broke through his wards, but their spiritual power isn’t malignant, doesn’t bear the seeds of ill intent. The absence of life in both of the visitors glares almost as brightly in his sight as their power does.
“You’re shinigami, aren’t you?” he asks.
The man in the black coat nods, smooths his partner’s bangs away from his eyes and straightens. “And you’re an onmyouji. Well, I guessed that much as soon as you went Within,” he adds, deceptively casual, “it’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it?” He slips another ofuda out of his pocket. “I’ll ask again. What did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Subaru says, because it’s true. “I’m assuming it isn’t sakanagi, as I didn’t feel him cast anything. It might be a different form of backlash from another power he attempted to use on me, if he has other abilities.”
“He’s an empath,” the man says, “but he can’t control it very well-wait, he touched you, didn’t he?” Some of the tension eases out of the man’s frame; his shoulders slouch forward as he jams his hands into his pockets.
“I believe he did.” Subaru straightens. “I can attempt to wake him up, but if he reacts this adversely to my presence…”
“Thanks, but-yeah, don’t. He must have seen something when he touched you.” The man grins awkwardly, clicks his tongue against his teeth. “I can’t even imagine what, if whatever he saw was strong enough to knock him out like this. What kind of onmyouji are you?”
“The thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan,” Subaru says. Again the truth, or part of it. “Sumeragi Subaru.” He bows, perhaps perfunctorily, but the man doesn’t seem to mind, or at the very least raises no objections.
“Well, that explains why breaking the wards on this place made me so dizzy,” the man says. “I’m Tsuzuki Asato.” He returns the bow, reaches forward and rumples the young man’s hair; the young man stirs and twitches slightly as though he’s trying to shake the touch off. “That’s Kurosaki Hisoka. We work for the Second Division of Enma-cho, in the Shokan department.”
“The murders have Meifu’s attention, then?” he asks, more out of professional courtesy than anything else.
“Well,” Tsuzuki says, “we’re usually good about not misplacing people, and it’s even worse when we can’t find their souls anywhere, so it’s getting a little troublesome.”
“I understand.”
“You didn’t sense his soul, did you?” Tsuzuki asks. “When you went Within?”
Subaru shakes his head slightly. “I couldn’t sense his consciousness. He didn’t retreat, he vanished.”
“That’s what we were worried about,” Tsuzuki says. “It’s kind of scary to think of something capable of doing something like that running around in Nagasaki.” He shivers-theatrically? The gesture looks exaggerated, almost too playful-and frowns. “I didn’t know this fell under the Sumeragi’s jurisdiction.”
“If it concerns the intrusion of the spiritual into the realm of the material, I suppose it does,” he says. Enma-daioh and his grandmother can discuss matters of jurisdiction if they so wish, and define spirituality and reality versus living and dead, and decide how a shinigami’s responsibilities differ from an onmyouji’s, and guard what they perceive to be their respective domains, but the delicate balance between what the Sumeragi’s duties require and what Meifu’s rule permits doesn’t concern him now. He isn’t investigating this on behalf of the Sumeragi.
Tsuzuki doesn’t seem inclined to press the point, and Subaru supposes he’s grateful for that. “No, no, you’re probably right,” he says, adding with a sigh, “The Chief never tells me anything. I remember the first case Hisoka and I worked on together-we didn’t realize we were partners until after he pulled a gun on me.”
“Oh,” Subaru says, half-listening.
“It was a fake gun, though. Hisoka doesn’t like to use weapons. Well, not modern ones, at least; he’s really good at archery, and I think he knows kendo, too-Tatsumi says he does, but I’ve never seen him practice.”
Subaru acknowledges him with an “Mm.”
“He’s a tough kid, though,” Tsuzuki continues. “And he isn’t really a kid anymore, either. Sometimes you forget that when you look at him.”
“How long will he remain unconscious?”
Tsuzuki shrugs. “It’s hard to say. His body’s kind of weak. He heals fast from physical wounds, but he doesn’t recover as well from other things-he has no tolerance for alcohol, and his stamina’s never been great. But since whatever you did to him hit his mind, I think he’ll recover in a few hours. He’s stubborn like that.” Tsuzuki’s brow creases, dims the force of his smile. “I mean, it doesn’t feel like he’s gone Within…”
Subaru kneels next to the young man-Kurosaki-and sends out part of his consciousness, drifts just above the surface of Kurosaki’s mind. His dreams don’t seem to have turned inward, and when Subaru tries to slide in deeper, Kurosaki pushes back, thrusts him as far away as he can. Not retreat, then, but recovery, a chance to reassemble his defenses, and from the feel of it they’re repairing themselves quickly. Subaru’s eyes snap open as his temples start to twinge. “He hasn’t,” he says. “You’re familiar with the condition?”
“Yeah.” Tsuzuki’s smile hangs listlessly on his face. “Well, as long as we’re working on the same case-I don’t know the Sumeragi’s policy on this, and I’m not entirely sure what Enma-daioh’s is, either-but it makes sense to share what we know, doesn’t it? I know things have been, well…”
“Strained,” Subaru supplies.
“Exactly. Strained between your family and Enma-cho, but we both want the same thing, don’t we? Or close enough to it.”
“I want this case to be resolved,” Subaru says. And then he’ll move on to his next assignment, and his next, whether his instructions come from the Sumeragi’s cell phone or the Sakurazukamori’s. He wonders what the distinction between them is; his function changes depending on who calls, yes, but a role is only that, a trapping, an illusion. Beneath that, what changes? What is there?
Will he get better at crafting illusions? He will, he supposes, if he’s expected to. He’ll be who he has to, what he has to. Who does Tsuzuki expect him to be?
Tsuzuki’s nodding. “So do I.” He perches on the edge of Matsumoto’s bed, a good distance away from the man himself. “It never really ends, does it?”
“No,” Subaru says. “It doesn’t.”
Silence stretches between them. Tsuzuki’s violet eyes catch the light sparkling from the surface of the bay. “Where are you going after this?” he asks.
“They found Matsumoto-san in Saikai,” Subaru says, “and he appears to be the first victim. I’ll start there.”
“Right. Hisoka and I might run into you there. We’re going to go to Nagasaki proper first, though. The Gushoshin think the killer’s headed there next.”
“You haven’t detected a pattern?” he asks.
“No. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but it looks really random so far.” He swings himself off the bed and bends over Kurosaki, scooping the young man up into his arms. “Which means the killer’s experimenting, or-” He hesitates.
“Or?”
“Or the killer’s not sure what he’s doing, or can’t control what he’s doing. He’s acting on instinct, killing anyone who crosses his path.”
Subaru nods in what he thinks is a suitably grave fashion, but the motive doesn’t change the outcome, not on the killer’s part and not on his. What drives a person to kill? He can answer for himself, but he can’t answer for anyone else.
“We’ll run into each other again, I think,” Tsuzuki says. “I’ll keep Hisoka from touching you when we do.” He pauses at the door, half-pivots on his heel and cranes his neck to get a better look at Subaru. “Either he didn’t understand what he saw, or he understood it too well.”
“I can’t say,” Subaru says. “I don’t know him.”
***
-the blood tints the petals pink-
“-Hisoka?”
Slowly, Hisoka pries his eyes open. His vision stays fogged over for a while, blurred and hazy from sleep. Tsuzuki, or a fuzzy silhouette in black that looks a lot like him, hovers over his bedside, his hand not-quite-touching Hisoka’s.
“Mmf,” Hisoka says, and coughs to clear his throat. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“See what?”
“Why there’s so much sakura in Meifu.” He rolls his shoulders back, listens to the pop and scrape of bone. “They signify death, don’t they?” No, not signify, that’s not the right word. “They are death,” he corrects. “There are corpses buried under them.”
Tsuzuki leans forward and braces the heels of his palms against the edge of the bed, presses down hard enough to tug the sheets loose. “Where did you see that?” he asks, then: “Was it after you touched that man?”
Hisoka nods. “Yeah. He-”
Tsuzuki springs up and pulls his coat over his shoulders before Hisoka finishes speaking.
“Tsuzuki,” he says. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I just have to check with the Gushoshin about something.” He dashes to the doorway and hops into his boots, tugs the laces tight. “I’ll be back in a few hours, five at most. I’ll meet you at Urakami Station if you’re feeling well enough to get out of bed, okay?”
“I’m fine,” Hisoka snaps, more out of reflex than anything else. “What’s wrong?”
“You know,” Tsuzuki says, “I have no idea. Just a hunch. It might be nothing.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Kind of. It’s hard to explain, I don’t know how much you know about the old clans-”
“A lot,” Hisoka says. “The Kurosaki are one of them, remember?”
Tsuzuki pauses, one boot half-laced and one boot still untied. “Oh. Right. Sorry about that.”
“You’re such an idiot.” Hisoka grunts and pushes himself upright until he’s sitting; borrowed blood drains away from his head and leaves him dizzy for a few seconds, but that clears soon enough. “Which clan?”
“The Sumeragi,” Tsuzuki says, and pauses. “And the Sakurazuka.”
Hisoka racks his mind for what he knows about them. The Sumeragi are obvious: advisors and defenders, leaders of the onmyouji, Japan’s spiritual protectors for centuries.
They’re entwined with the Sakurazuka, who-practice dark onmyoujutsu, that makes sense, there has to be a light side and a dark side and it’s clear which one the Sumeragi fall under. Sakurazukamori, the legend started getting popular again just before Hisoka died, the assassin in the shadows-
-guardian of the sakura barrow, that’s what the name means. Of course. Tsuzuki’s not the only moron in the room.
“You think that man was the Sakurazukamori?” Hisoka asks.
“I don’t know,” Tsuzuki says. “But he called himself the Sumeragi.”
“Oh.” Shit.
“Officially, we just sort of let the Sakurazukamori go after his targets. Or her targets, the last one I met was a woman. But he’s dangerous, whoever he is. He has to be, to kill the kind of people he does.”
“Who does he kill?” Hisoka asks.
“People too dangerous for the government to leave alive.”
“So he’s like us,” Hisoka says.
Tsuzuki’s laces fall from his hands and clatter against the sides of his boots. “Yeah, I guess you can say that. Whoops, dropped these.” He pulls the laces tight, and Hisoka can hear the sound of the leather straining, the grommets squeaking. “Hisoka-”
Hisoka knows what he’s going to say before he says it. He doesn’t even need empathy for that trick. “If you ask me how I’m feeling one more time,” he says, “I’ll hit you.”
Tsuzuki holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I give in. If you aren’t here, I’ll look for you by Urakami Station, all right?”
“Yeah, fine.” He pauses. “Tsuzuki?”
“Hm?”
“What do you think he’s after?”
Tsuzuki finishes knotting his laces and stands. “The same thing we are,” he says. “On the surface, anyway. Other than that, I don’t know.”
Hisoka spends about ten minutes in bed rubbing his eyes and reorienting himself before he slips on his shoes and heads out the door. Like hell he’s waiting around in the room for hours. He might be able to get some work done while Tsuzuki’s away; the killer’s probably reached Nagasaki by now, and he might be able to sense a malicious presence stalking the streets, might be able to detect fluctuations in spiritual power. It’s better than sitting in bed and watching game shows until Tsuzuki gets back.
He takes the tram to Nagasakieki-mae, walks to Nagasaki Station, takes the JR Nagasaki line to Urakami Station, and arrives with hours to kill before he’s supposed to meet Tsuzuki. He extends his senses as far as he dares at a train station-it’s easy to get overwhelmed here, crushed by hundreds of minds milling around-but pulls back when he senses something cold and silent to the north, a place his power curls away from. It fills his ears with eerie flat ringing, distant echoes of long-lost sounds. He glances at a map mounted on the wall of one of the platforms and calculates. North of here, that’s-
-the Nagasaki Peace Park. Right. He rubs the back of his head. Tsuzuki said the place was cleansed long ago, but it feels like they purged everything from it when they cleaned up. No pain, no joy, no life, no death, just flatness and faint reflections.
Unless. Unless the cleansing aura over that place purges anyone who enters or at least masks their presence, because there have to be visitors in the park now, and he can’t sense them either. He’s not experienced enough to pick out individual threads of power kilometers away, but he should be able to get some general sense of the place, even if it’s just the impression that the only people there are ordinary humans. And if that’s the case, then the aura must be a good shield for anyone trying to evade detection.
Hisoka’s sneakers thud against the concrete. The tram’s almost ready to pull out of Urakamieki-mae when he arrives, so he sprints the last few meters and skids to a halt in front of the door, bolts through it, and disembarks at Matsuyama-machi.
Up the stone steps at the entranceway-tomorrow his legs will hate him for this-and down the shallower steps to the Peace Fountain at the park’s southern end. His footsteps echo flatly in the basin; not many bodies are around to absorb the sound. The park’s not crowded today, the anniversary of the bombing was three days ago and the people have mostly cleared out since then, don’t want to stay any longer than they have to. The water shoots up in high columns, ringing a black plaque in the center of the pool. Droplets of water spray across Hisoka’s face and mingle with the sweat on his forehead. There are three other visitors to the fountain: a mother clutching her child’s hand and feeding him a sweet, and a man in a long brown coat.
Do you like the sakura?
Hisoka steps closer, braces himself against the lingering scent. “You’re here,” he says, softly enough that the mother and child won’t hear.
The Sumeragi (or is it the Sakurazukamori?) turns, regards him with the green eye first and then the gold one. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Work.”
Hisoka folds his arms over his chest. “Whose work?”
“My own.” The Sumeragi trails his thumb over the seam of his glove.
“And who are you?” Hisoka plants his feet on the concrete, tries to stare the Sumeragi down but he’s not tall enough and the man doesn’t seem to be looking at Hisoka but through him.
“Your partner introduced us,” he says. “Though I don’t think you were conscious at the time.”
Hisoka snorts. “He probably got something wrong.”
“Then I suppose I should make your acquaintance again,” the Sumeragi says, and bows. “Sumeragi Subaru.”
“Kurosaki Hisoka. Is that the only name you go by?”
“No.”
the wind drowns out the rest, shrieks through the petals and whips them around until only the smile’s clear, only the smile pierces the flurry
Hisoka jerks backwards.
Sumeragi-Hisoka mentally drops the “the” prefix-doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown, doesn’t blink. “I should apologize for what happened yesterday.”
“You didn’t know,” Hisoka says, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Sumeragi inclines his head, not assenting but not dissenting either. “Your partner told me that you’re an empath.”
Do most of them run screaming from you? he wants to ask, but doesn’t. Yet. The mother and child ascend the steps; now that Hisoka’s in the park, his senses sharpen enough to see vague shapes of emotions through the static the place creates. It’s counterintuitive, the aura should be even stronger now that he’s in the park, strong enough to cancel out his power, but sometimes you can see things better when you’re closer to them, he guesses, or maybe the aura’s like tinted glass, transparent from the inside but opaque from the outside. Either way, he senses dim wisps of peace circling the mother and child and billowing from them in soft ripples.
Darker echoes cut across them-
his hands burn, inverted stars seared into his skin, steam rising from them and melting the snowflakes falling around him
with this I mark you as my prey
He wrenches his senses away from Sumeragi and pulls them back into himself.
“Can you control it?” Sumeragi asks quietly.
Hisoka’s hands curl into fists in his pockets. “Yes,” he lies. But he’s getting better at it, he knows that he is even if better still isn’t good enough, he doesn’t clutch his head and shake and twitch in crowds anymore and he hasn’t confused other people’s emotions for his own in years and he can even touch now, he can touch Tsuzuki and it doesn’t hurt. This man, whoever he really is, has no right to make Hisoka hurt. “Most of the time. Your magic might not mix well with mine. It’s probably just that.”
“If you like,” Sumeragi says, which isn’t a yes or a no.
“I don’t.” Hisoka pivots on his heel, meets Sumeragi’s mismatched eyes dead on. “But I’m dealing with it.” He scuffs his heel against the slick stones. It skids more than he wanted it to. “Why are you here?”
Sumeragi looks away first. “It’s quiet. Clean. Empty.”
“Is it really?” Hisoka asks.
“It gives the illusion of it.”
“But that’s not real.” Hisoka can’t even pick out the threads in the snarl of emotions wrapped tight somewhere deep inside Sumeragi, it’s just sharp stabs of pain punctuating something even darker, something that makes his stomach knot and churn when he thinks about it. This is the man responsible for Japan’s spiritual purity? “It’s not really like that. Now that this place isn’t stopping me from looking inside, I can feel things…” Whispers in the ground shake the gravel, shift it under his feet; nothing big enough to be an earthquake or even a tremor but enough of a presence to ride under the surface of his consciousness, or just above it.
“Sometimes,” Sumeragi says, “it’s easier to sustain the illusion.” He takes a cigarette from his pocket, lights it and keeps his gloves on in the process, brown leather scraping across the gear of his lighter. He breathes in softly, lets the smoke curl around his fingertips. His eyes lid, but not in pleasure, Hisoka doesn’t think-or feel, for that matter, though looking any deeper into Sumeragi’s heart than he already does without making an effort at it is-
cloth seals the sight of the brands away, but it’s a flimsy barrier at best, you can’t hide forever and he doesn’t
-asking for trouble.
“How long have you been doing that?” Hisoka asks.
Sumeragi looks down at his cigarette; ashes flake from the glowing end, and a few drift down and land on the rippling water. “Years. I started when I was seventeen.”
“You know that’s going to kill you someday,” he says.
“It might,” Sumeragi concedes, inhaling again. Thin columns of smoke trail through the air and mingle with the mist rising from the fountain. Hisoka listens to the water splash into the basin for what feels like minutes on end, watches his reflection ripple and churn and distort.
Distort. Everything about this place distorts. Cleaning is another way of masking, concealing the evidence, he thought as much when he entered the park. But things are clearer inside the wards.
He looks at Sumeragi’s choppy reflection shimmering in the water and draws in a breath. “Did you kill them?” he finally asks.
Sumeragi glances up, his cigarette pinched tightly between the joints of his fingers.
“You have the power to do it,” Hisoka says. Sumeragi doesn’t deny the fact, because there’s false modesty and then there’s idiocy and downplaying the magnitude of his power in this situation falls under the latter category. “Did you?”
“No,” Sumeragi says. He drops his cigarette to the stones and grinds it out. “Their deaths are my responsibility, but I didn’t cause them.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Sumeragi looks out over the water. “I can’t force you to believe me.”
A thrill races through Hisoka’s stomach. “You could let me read you.”
“I believe you already tried that.” He doesn’t add in the part about Hisoka getting knocked unconscious, doesn’t need to. “If the results didn’t satisfy you then, I doubt they would now.”
The bones in Hisoka’s hands shift, tighten, grind together, and Sumeragi still won’t look at him, won’t deign to turn his head Hisoka’s way. “I know what to look for now,” he says.
This time, for the first time, Sumeragi meets Hisoka’s eyes. The green one catches the afternoon light cascading over the water and absorbs some of its quality (the light’s quality, not the water’s, his eyes reflect water but don’t have any of the actual substance in it, so he’s not in danger of crying), threatening to overflow but never spilling. The golden one remains detached, distant. “Do you want to look?”
“Why, what will I find?”
Something siphons the light away. Sumeragi looks down.
“If you don’t answer,” Hisoka says, “it just makes you look guiltier.”
“Justice doesn’t work on those principles, Kurosaki-san.”
“Your justice doesn’t. Meifu doesn’t need you to confess and secure your conviction.”
“Then how do you plan to prove my guilt?” Sumeragi asks.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, Hisoka almost retorts. And a murderer like the Sakurazukamori would know how to clean up after himself. But he’s a detective, not a lawyer, and he can leave the bureaucratic headaches to another department. “I don’t have to. My job’s to bring you in.”
Sumeragi sighs. “You have the wrong suspect.”
“We found you over Matsumoto-san’s body,” Hisoka shoots back.
“He was comatose for over a week before I arrived,” Sumeragi says.
“Maybe you arrived earlier than you said you did.” Hisoka plants his feet down as firmly as he can, even if he doesn’t have much traction on these stones. “Maybe we walked in on you erasing the evidence. You almost sent me Within. What’s to say you didn’t make Matsumoto-san like that in the first place? But then you left something behind,” he continues, he’s on a roll now, “something we could trace back to you, so you pretended to be the Sumeragi to get access to Matsumoto-san and took care of it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t what?” Hisoka snaps. He tunes into the ebb and flow of power in the park. Sumeragi, or whoever he really is, doesn’t appear to be drawing anything into himself or laying down a spell or readying to attack-which is good, Hisoka thinks, because he’s trying to remember if Konoe or Tsuzuki taught him how to stop an onmyouji from banishing him and he’s not sure if either of them ever did. He inches closer to the fountain, his back to the water. He slips his hand into his pocket and grips one of his ofuda, but can he match Sumeragi at onmyoujutsu? If Tsuzuki was here, the two of them might, the two of them probably could if Tsuzuki brought out his shiki, but Tsuzuki’s not here and Hisoka doesn’t have shikigami and if Sumeragi attacks he’ll have to think of something, draw power from somewhere. “What didn’t you do?” Maybe if he gets Sumeragi to talk…even if Sumeragi’s barely said more than two sentences in a row so far, there must be something, something that’ll make him react and if he’s talking he might be distracted enough for Hisoka to get the upper hand for a while.
“I didn’t almost send you Within,” Sumeragi says. “I didn’t sense that you wanted to retreat from the world. You’re-” He hesitates. “You’re stronger than that.”
Oh. Hisoka opens and closes his mouth a few times, then says, “You can’t do anything when you hide from the world. You’re worse than useless. You’re a burden.”
Sumeragi inclines his head. “You’re right.”
Enough. Enough of this man’s silence and deference, enough of evasions and niceties and half-truths and concessions. Stop pretending like you’re interested, Hisoka wants to shout. Stop pretending like you understand. “Being self-effacing doesn’t make you any nobler,” he says. It doesn’t make you better than me.
“I never said that it did,” Sumeragi says. “And I wouldn’t call myself noble.”
Sometimes Hisoka really hates the standard Japanese forms of politeness. “Look, one way or another,” whether you’re Sumeragi or Sakurazuka, he adds silently, “you’re the most powerful onmyouji in Japan. You know it, I know it. So you don’t have to pretend to be anything else.”
Sumeragi trails his fingers through the jet of water closest to him; it pools in the palm of his hand, drips down his fingers, and almost hisses as it falls back into the basin. “What do you want to know?” he asks.
Hisoka’s fingers finally unclench around the ofuda. “Are you really Sumeragi Subaru?”
“Yes.” Sumeragi looks as though he might elaborate, as though yes has more meanings than just the one, but stops himself. “I am.”
“And you’re the thirteenth head of your clan.”
A slight pause. Hisoka makes a note of his hesitation. “Yes,” Sumeragi says.
“Then why are there so many sakura barrows in your memories?”
Sumeragi flinches, draws his fingers out of the water and rubs his hand like he’s trying to return sensation to it.
Hisoka presses on. “What’s your connection to the Sakurazukamori?”
Before Sumeragi responds, a young couple walks down the steps to the fountain, their hands twined together. The woman stands on her tiptoes to whisper something in the man’s ear, something that makes him smile and kiss her cheek. They pause briefly before the fountain; Hisoka jerks his gaze towards the water so it doesn’t look like he was staring and watches their reflections instead of them. The woman closes her eyes, mouth moving in silent prayer, though the way the water ripples foils Hisoka’s attempts to read her lips. She nods once to the man, and they move away from the fountain until their reflections vanish.
He doesn’t know if comforting is the right adjective for it, but it’s something to consider.
“I told you I had more than one name,” Sumeragi says, speaking into the water.
“Yeah. I remember.”
“My other name is Sakurazuka.”
Two faces. Two eyes. Hisoka backs away, circles the rim of the fountain. “Who are you?” he asks.
“I am-” Sumeragi’s voice doesn’t break, but there’s a flat hollow echo to it, one that stretches out to encompass the entire basin and the pathway leading to the Peace Statue and goes on and on and on beyond even that. “I am what I’ve been made to be.”
“That’s…” Hisoka shakes his head, but the words still won’t come out the way he wants them to. He’s wrong, though, he has to be, he’s-other people can’t make you-
The curse stirs slowly under his skin, starts to prickle and set his hairs on end. Don’t you dare, he tells it, gritting his teeth, don’t you fucking dare. “You’re wrong,” he tells Sumeragi. “You can’t-you can’t let other people do that to you. You can’t let them tell you who you are.”
Sumeragi looks at Hisoka’s arms, or the few centimeters of them that aren’t covered by his jacket. It’s really too warm to wear one, but he’d feel worse without the sleeves. He holds his index and middle fingers in front of his face, his eyes half-lidded. Does he see the curse? Hisoka crosses his arms over his chest, but that’s not enough to hide from magical sight. “Stop that,” he says.
Is that-is that envy flaring up behind Sumeragi’s eyes?
Hisoka’s breast pocket vibrates. Arumikan no marui en o mashikaku ni orinagara…
Wait, since when the hell does he have Love Me as his ringtone? He sighs. Watari’s fault, probably. Definitely not Hisoka’s doing, he hates the damn song. He checks the caller ID: Tsuzuki.
“Did you find anything?” he asks.
“Yeah, actually,” Tsuzuki says. He sounds a little out-of-breath. He didn’t blow up the library again, did he? “Listen, are you at Urakami Station?”
“I’m close,” he says. “Matsuyama-machi. The Nagasaki Peace Park.”
“Try to get over there soon, all right?”
“Why, am I late?”
“No, you’re not late,” Tsuzuki says. “But we found another body in Saikai.”
Shit. Saikai? Is the killer retracing his steps and not going into Nagasaki proper like they thought he would? “I’ll be there soon.” He clicks the phone shut.
“Someone else died,” he tells Sumeragi. “We were standing around and talking, and someone else died. Come on.”
“Do you want my assistance?” Sumeragi asks.
“Not really,” Hisoka says honestly. “But for now it looks like you have an alibi.” And if Sumeragi comes with him, it’ll be easier for Hisoka to keep an eye on him. Hisoka might not quite know how to catch an onmyouji in the act, but Tsuzuki will.
Sumeragi nods slowly and shakes the last few drops of water from his fingertips. They sparkle in the reddening light before they sink back into the fountain.
--
So much research, oh my god. The Sumeragi/Meifu polite tension is entirely my invention -- it's analogous to the way different law enforcement agencies try to one-up each other, but a lot more passive-aggressive. "Love Me" is the Yami no Matsuei ending theme, and I get the feeling that it's not exactly Hisoka's kind of song.
And yes, I did imply that Tsuzuki met Setsuka. That's a side story at some point, I think.