Humidity

A/N: I know, I am very, badly tardy.  I can make all the excuses I want and most of them are completely valid, but after a wait like this I think we can all do without the chit-chat and get back to the meat of the matter, eh?

 

Thank you so much, though, to anyone who began reading this and returns to it now.  Fortunately I have begun work on the chapter following this one, and in all honesty I believe there will only be two more chapters after this, so I do hope this has been well worth the wait.  If not, don’t hesitate to correct me.

 

Anyway,

 

Humidity

Chapter III

Freezer Burn

28 July 2011

 

The humans on television were tramping around in a snowstorm, and Hiei envied their certainly, admittedly, fatal mishap as he lay there watching.  The only thing less optimistic on TV right now was the weather forecast.

 

He only laid two-thirds across the couch.  His legs were slung over the far arm, and his own arms had plenty of room left to cross on the all-but-vacant cushion above his head.  He wore a billowy pair of pants and no shirt, and idly flexed bare toes while staring lackadaisically at the screen several feet in front of him. 

 

At the very top of his peripheral vision, as he was lying down, he barely perceived a wisp of red creeping past.  “I’m not asleep,” he said, tucking in his legs, sitting up and looking over at Kurama.

 

Who in his turn straightened up and adopted a more cavalier pose.  “The heat’s known to make people drowsy,” he replied sheepishly.  “I was unsure whether you were drifting off, or only resting.”

 

This face-saving begat a shrug.  “It’s not that hot,” Hiei dismissed.  But it was certainly humid, and as Hiei noted the flimsy dress shirt that Kurama wore, he told himself that it would be soaked through with perspiration within ten minutes of the Fox stepping outside.  “Where are you going?” he asked, because even Kurama didn’t wear something like that to loaf around the house, like he was.

 

Perceiving his thoughts, Kurama smiled.  “I am taking Mother to lunch.  It’s been a busy week, and I won’t see her at all this weekend.”  Mildly he mentioned, as though an afterthought, “She gets uncomfortable if I don’t check in regularly.”

 

Hiei could bet.  “What does your family think you do when you’re out of town?” he asked, partially because he wanted to enact interest in Kurama’s human family, if nothing else, for the human part of Kurama’s sake; and partially because Kurama didn’t speak elaborately on the specifics he did as Yomi’s aide, and Hiei didn’t know, these days.

 

Neutrally: “I am aiding in a friend’s matrimonial affairs.”  Kurama appeared unaware of, or unaffected by, Hiei’s stiffening, Hiei’s bristling.  “I’ve finished making the necessary inquiries, and I’ve arranged for a meeting to take place.”

 

Hiei’s guts were contracted, as though bunched up and left on a block of ice.  He eased back and massaged his stomach.  “You word things so neatly,” he said coolly.

 

At the very side of his peripheral vision, as he sat aright now, he saw Kurama’s brows crinkle, then lift and smooth in an enlightened Ah.  “I don’t mean it like that,” the Fox said demurely.  Hiei stared straight ahead at the television, and watched the monster Yuki-Ohna try to lure the last human straggler alive to lay down to sleep in the middle of the snowstorm.  Yuki-Ohna, the Snow Queen.  That ice-cold bitch in the story books Hiei had looked through that morning while Kurama was distracted making breakfast.  The Fox had been right; an apt comparison indeed.

 

But now Kurama persisted with a related subject Hiei would much rather he leave cold.  “How long did it take you to locate the Floating Isle, even with the aid of the Jagan?” the redhead pointed out.  “I sympathize with Yukina’s wish, but I respect your ability to do the right thing.”  Hiei glanced sideways at him—what right thing?—but Kurama was still on a role composing his defense: “Besides, I lack the information to coordinate any fulfillment in two days’ time, and I’ll be in Gandhara all weekend besides.”

 

Then what matrimonial—never mind, Hiei had already discerned from earshot that weddings came attached with many strings, none of which he wished to become personally ensnared in.  Instead Hiei grunted an absolving “Hn” and shrugged at Kurama, who replied with a placating smile.

 

“Would you care to join Mother and me?” Kurama asked as he grabbed his keys from by the door.

 

Good, a change in route.  “I’m not putting anything on that’ll stick to me when I try to take it back off,” Hiei negated.  Kurama laughed at him and he shrugged it off.  “Besides, I intimidate the woman.”

 

“You do not,” Kurama continued to laugh.  “Or if so, not for the reasons you suppose.”  Hiei raised an eyebrow.  “You’re something of a myth to her, do you know that?  The mysterious man who charmed and saved her son.”

 

Yes, the mysterious man that Shiori Hatanaka had once walked in on naked.  Hiei gathered the flesh of his cheek to the flesh just above his eye, and managed an uncertain-sounding exhalation acknowledging what it was Kurama had said.

 

For his part the Fox had sobered, and now looked pensive.  “Mythic indeed,” he murmured, and without looking at Hiei he sprung, “You realize they believe that my … problem,” he settled upon, “was contingent to you?”

 

Defeated, Yuki-Ohna showed herself for a monster and spiraled away with the storm.  Hiei ignored the television, and stared hard at Kurama.  “Excuse me?”

 

“My feelings for you, more accurately,” Kurama elaborated.  “When I was in the hospital, I told her and Kazuya that I had been battling an inner demon for a very long time.”  He pressed his lips together thoughtfully.  “Due to your presence here, and your appearance, and act, at my … my sickbed, they construed that I had moved out and turned inward for fear of disapproval.  They thought that the anxiety had overcome me.”

 

Hiei stared at the television, but didn’t discern what was happening onscreen.  “You let them believe that?” he asked, figuring Kurama must have.  His choice of alternate explanations that wouldn’t make him appear even sicker in the head was limited, and the truth was not among them.

 

“I did fear their disapproval.”  Kurama shrugged, his posture and voice that of candid admission.  “It wasn’t my most imperative worry, in light of more … essential issues, but the conclusion they came to was not a lie, and I granted them that.”  Hiei continued to look at him, and must have worn an odd expression, because Kurama in turn continued, “I used to feel a similar anxiety towards you too, you know.”

 

Hiei did know; when Kurama confessed his feelings for him, he also confessed a previous fear of disclosing them, wary of an unfavorable, even a violent reception.  Of course by then that was subordinate—Kurama wanted, or thought he wanted, to die. 

 

“And did you ever have, what did you call them, ‘panic attacks’ over me?” he asked the redhead, wondering what was the point of this therapy session.

 

“You saw me have one the night we consummated our relationship,” Kurama told him.  He blinked; it was an unexpected answer.  “But I find that often, that sort of anxiety is unfounded, and more than often, the people we feel it over would never want us to suffer so for them.”

 

Rerouted.  That was Kurama’s intention, then.  Hiei straightened up, rolled his eyes.  “Fox,” he dismissed, “take your mother to lunch.  Tell her I say Hello.”

 

Kurama smiled again, that cavalier smile of being found out and not caring.  “Food for thought, Hiei, since you’re backing out of lunch.”

 

“I can’t back out of something I never agreed to!” Hiei threw hotly at Kurama’s back as he left.

***

Knowing nothing until recently about panic attacks, Hiei hadn’t recognized Kurama’s behavior the night they first went to bed as such.  Confronted with something that disjointed him to the marrow, Kurama had gone into flight mode, and there had been much scrambling before Hiei caught and steadied him.

 

Were that Hiei had that mobility, because even in his dreams, panic seized him and locked his limbs.

 

Locked his limbs but not his mind, and even asleep he noted the irony that it was him held down and helpless as a baby bird, and her that loomed large and threatening as a dragon.  Her breath cut him with its chilliness, froze him until all he was aware of was that desperate burning sensation, more gripping than fire and more loathe to release that grip.

 

He winced as she stroked his cheek.  In the dream her fingers ended in sharp claws and raked his skin; blood steamed in the freezing air, rapidly cooled and solidified in splotches on his face, until he resembled some stained glass grotesque.

 

“Go to sleep,” she beckoned him sweetly.  His eyelids fluttered, but one eye cracked open warily.  Smiling, she wagged one claw in rebuke, then drew it over his eye, peeling open white and iris like a grape, then jabbing down the pupil, and plucked the entire thing out.  The flesh around his socket puckered in a sense of compliance.

 

“Go to sleep,” she implored cheerily.  He shut his eye but drew no rest from it; with her pointer claw she traced little nonsense patterns over the lid until it tore to fragments and tore away, exposing his eye to insolence and performing the same manner of rebuke over again.  Two bereft sockets stared impotently up to her.

 

“Go to sleep, Emiko,” she ordered authoritatively.  “And never wake up.”

 

Something burned, not the gripping hostile burn of frostbite, but an abrasive, propelling burn, fuel in a machine.  He saw again, vision frosted and incomplete, like staggering through a snowstorm, but sufficient enough to detect anything treacherous.

 

“NO!” he snarled, lashing out at last, and it was not Yukina he hit, because the snow-woman had transmogrified into a hoary crone, whose shrieks stung on the wind as she flung herself away from him.  The frozen currents enveloped her, and then disappeared, and Hiei stood blinking in the sun.

***

And Hiei woke blinking on the couch.  He’d fallen asleep, and the TV channel was showing the movie over again.  Yuki-Ohna had spiraled away into the night, and the human awoke in the morning, only to discover that he and his fallen comrades had spent the night in circles mere feet away from their camp.

 

“Fuck you, Kurosawa,” Hiei muttered, cursing the man who created the movie, created the movie out of his dreams.  He held his head in his hand, and felt tired despite the hour and a half approximate that he had slept.  The door opened; he looked up and saw Kurama step in.  One hand clutched the Fox’s keys, the other lifted his hair up off of his neck.  His hair was engorged from the moisture, and rebel strands stuck to the slick of his skin.  Hiei had been right to wager the humidity’s effect on his friend’s outfit, just as Kurama had been right to wear the undershirt that was perfectly outlined and all but perfectly visible under his attire by now.

 

Kurama either gave up or achieved the moment’s airy reprieve, because he released the spray of hair that was compliant, and it fell messily over his shoulders.  Kurama rumpled, tousled from the heat reminded Hiei of another storybook figure he’d encountered that morning: the effeminate knight Saint George, slayer of the dragon.

 

Kurama caught him looking and smiled.  “Fell asleep after all?”

 

“Is your mother with you?” Hiei asked.

 

“No, why—?”

 

A blur as Hiei vaulted the couch and pinned the Fox to the wall.  He did the courtesy of unbuttoning the shirt, not ripping, and Kurama did him the courtesy of shrugging out of it.  It fell and hung limply, pinned between the wall and Kurama’s ass.  Hiei reached down Kurama’s pants and untucked the undershirt, pushing it up and pushing his hands up under it.  The flesh beneath was firm from their sparring matches, and tight from the meal digesting within, and Hiei smirked a little at the grunt he elicited when he pressed down.  Slowly he massaged Kurama’s stomach, and worked his hands upward, until he palmed the curve of Kurama’s ribs, felt the hardness of solid sternum under the Fox’s flesh.  He parted his hands either way then, found Kurama’s nipples already standing at attention, and pinched them, tugging on them hard.

 

The flesh beneath his hold rose and fell with increased rhythm.  Kurama ceased panting and pressed his lips together; took a deep breath, throwing himself further into Hiei’s mercy—and reached up and seized Hiei’s hands, interlacing their fingers.  He pulled them down, pressing them against the juncture of Hiei’s legs.  “Inspiring naptime?” the Fox teased.

 

Hiei swayed his hips, unlaced his fingers and clasped them around Kurama’s wrists, insurance against teasing.  “I dreamt,” he panted.

 

Kurama looked amused.  “Of?”

 

O that cavalier smile.  “Saint George,” he detracted.

 

A confused wrinkle in Kurama’s forehead.  “The dragon-slayer?”

 

Hiei threw Kurama over the couch, and himself after him.

 

They didn’t lie together for long after.  Despite his loneliness, his funk, and despite Kurama’s more-than-willingness to help dispel said loneliness, it was too hot for stagnant physical contact.

 

Kurama stirred as Hiei dropped off the couch and stretched out on the floor.  “There’s room to be had, you know,” he murmured to the floor, drawing up his legs and revealing ample seating space left.

 

“Luxuriate,” Hiei declined.  The floor was cooler anyhow.

 

Kurama put his legs back down.  “How do you know Saint George?”

 

“Are your books exclusively for you to read now?” Hiei replied.  He rolled to an angle on his side and glanced at the television.  Another dream was on; demons in the ruins of a city.  The demons used to be human.

 

“I didn’t dream of Saint George,” he said at last.  “I dreamt a Koorime ripped out my eyes.”

 

Quiet.  Kurama looked thoughtful. 

 

Then.

 

“I sometimes dream that crows rip at my flesh,” the redhead said, slowly, musingly.  “After the first few occurrences, I wondered that they never took my eyes.”

 

Hiei said nothing.  Sometimes Kurama betrayed the barest hints of struggle while he slept, and the struggle could be against a plethora of things, such was the store of potential bogeymen when Yoko slept under your skull.

 

“They always leave my face intact,” Kurama concluded, then raised his eyebrows, as though sweeping his mind clear, looked at Hiei, and said, “If you do object to me even giving Kuwabara and Yukina information…”

 

Hiei shrugged the shoulder he wasn’t lying on.  “What do you know,” he reminded him, “that’s of actual use?”

 

“I put her in contact with Toya,” Kurama tested.

 

The Jaganshi rolled onto his back, looked up at Kurama with an expression that feigned, So what?  “Not all ice apparitions are the same, and they certainly don’t all talk to each other.  Do foxes all talk to each other?”

 

“Sometimes we do,” Kurama murmured.

 

“What?”  Hiei had made that last inquiry rhetorically.  “Hn,” he dismissed.  “Toya’s a male, which makes his status as ice apparition nil in relation to the Floating Isle.” 

 

Never mind that Toya, as a former shinobi, would be adept at gathering obscure information, and doing so discretely.

 

Hiei thrashed his head either way, popping his neck.  “Stop cross-examining yourself so often,” he told Kurama.  “You were correct in your statement earlier: nothing you have to offer jeopardizes me.”

 

And all the while he said this, Kurama looked down at him with heavy features, an expression that seemed apologetic, or at least pitying.

 

He soon became aware of this, as did Kurama become aware of him looking back.  The heavy expression lightened into a smile.  “Have you seen the beginning of this film before, Hiei?”

 

The movie was part-way done when Hiei came upon it the first time; he’d slept through the beginning this time.  “No,” he said simply.

 

“You should catch it sometime.  The first dream is about a foxes’ wedding.”  He peeled himself off the couch, straightened his pants, and gathered up his discarded shirts.  “Any thoughts on dinner?” he asked.  Hiei shrugged.  “You need to eat.”

 

“Didn’t you just come back from lunch?” the half-Koorime retorted.

 

Kurama wore a funny expression when he looked down at him this time.  “I could eat again,” the Fox said, in a tone too carefully neutral to be genuine.  Hiei parted his lips away from his teeth, a nonverbal I’ll bet.

 

“We could go out,” Kurama continued, arranging his hair over one shoulder.  “I’ll buy you an iced coffee.”  He smiled over at Hiei and shrugged.  “I’ll be in Gandhara all weekend.  I leave early in the morning to avoid the heat.”

 

And Kurama would be mobile in Gandhara; no point in paying a “diplomatic” visit for the weekend.

 

“We could go out,” Hiei conceded, tipping his chin at Kurama in a curt nod, while leaning forward and assembling his limbs in a strategic crouch.  “We could go out later.”

 

He pounced.

------------

 

A/N: The movie Hiei was watching is Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, a movie that is a compilation of segments allegedly based on his own dreams.  The dreams referenced in this chapter are “The Blizzard” (the third dream), “The Weeping Demon” (the seventh dream) and “Sunshine Through the Rain” (the first dream).

 

I don’t particularly remember how Saint George got tossed into a chapter that drew so much from Yuki-Ohna.  That was a development that occurred only in the past few days while I was revising and writing the end of the chapter.  Using the description “cavalier” might have been the culprit, but I thought because of the dragon it tied to the other things nicely enough.  Let me know if it worked?