Risk of Conviction

YOU COULD HAVE BEEN A CANDLE

 

Hiei stared out into the moon, watching something else entirely.

 

Miles away, not even in the direction Hiei was facing, Kurama unbuttoned his school uniform jacket. He shrugged it down and slung it onto a hanger to put away for the next day.

 

The closet held a mix of silks, tweeds, Western, Chinese, traditional and street clothes.  Costumes, Hiei recognized with a smirk. The fox loved his disguises. “Clothes are seventy percent of human perception,” Kurama had said, months ago.

 

The fox worked his belt for a moment and slipped down his trousers. The dark boxers showed some kind of intricate green design, puckered at the waist and taut over his ass and thighs. The kitsune was well proportioned, that slender human body toned like ringing silver. 

 

Hiei’s foot slipped.

 

When he pulled himself back onto the branch and calmed down, the trousers were hung on the closet door and Kurama was smoothing the crease.

 

Then the fox yawned, stretched, and gave a small wave to his letter to Hiei, a moronic goodbye.

 

Hiei fumed.

 

Kurama was the most emotional creature Hiei had ever known—and the most controlled. But what did he live for?  Only those he adored, arbitrarily chosen. And for his own life, he cared nothing, throwing blood magic and life trades around like they were dead leaves.

 

Hiei watched.

 

A tape recorder was playing on the desk next to an open notebook. That was right, Hiei remembered. Class lecture. The fox was fascinated with those human theories, the machination of cells and chemicals. He had become so at a young age, trying to quantify the emotional attachment he felt forming toward his mother. The modern human sciences had given him understandings that practice could not, allowing him to improvise in extravagant, focused leaps.  Combined with energy manipulation, that knowledge probably was worth more than the fox’s quiet uses for it, yet he studied.

 

“Hiei. Do you realize your Jagan bridges your two blood lines?” Kurama had informed him after eleven years in the human world when they were still eye to eye in height. “Tell me, can you access your powers without the eye open?”

 

Hiei had not told him. A fox was a fox.

 

Kurama leaned over and snapped off the tape.  He moved to the window and knelt.  Trays of flowering plants stationed there rustled. They twisted to tap his shoulders and face. Kurama drew his hair over his shoulder in smooth handfuls and was quiet.

 

The letter was a lie, of course. Kurama was not surrendering himself, so in control. He’d been caught in his den – his mother’s hospital bed. He would be pulled it. Summoned for questioning.

 

Hiei wondered. He wasn’t sure what sort of punishments Spirit World employed. Was it not telling then that no one returned willing to even lie about the Spirit Ruler’s weakness?

 

In the house, Kurama pulled out the rose stem he used for his whip. He dipped it in water and stuck it firmly into the potting soil of a larger rosebush. He did the same with two other twigs Hiei did not know, then began gathering small handfuls of seeds and putting them into bags, dropping them in the water, planting them or leaving them in the starlight on the windowsill.

 

He paused then, breathing slowly, slouched over his knees.

 

“If I were not so cruel,” Kurama said aloud, resting his face on his clasped hands.

 

To Hiei’s Jagan, the words echoed metallically. Hiei laughed softly. Kurama was hard on himself.

 

A vine leaned over, twining into his bangs. Kurama had to shoo it back.

 

The fox dressed casually, innocently, in light khakis and a white button down.  He added a thin red tie at the last minute and picked up his bag.  With his free hand, and not the one he had initially used to for his note to Hiei, he penned a note to his mother in elegant script: ‘I love you. Please take care of the plants if I’m not back—except for the ones marked with purple ribbons, destroy those.  But don’t burn them; fire releases their toxin.’ He leaned down, scribbling intently, and the short note became a volume.

 

Hiei laughed and shook his head. If Kurama did not come back, his plants would die. No human could perform half the intricacies of their care, even written. No one had Kurama’s patience toward quiet growing things.

 

Kurama folded the paper and tucked it in his desk. He ran down the stairs and had a grocery list shoved in his hand before he made it out the door. They argued on the porch about medicines; Kurama was right and won, but felt he’d been abrasive from his other worries and apologized. Then he went down the walk to the subway where the portal would be opened.

 

The woman stayed in the doorway a moment, smiling. She had no idea that her son might be walking into oblivion.

 

Hiei didn’t want to stop watching. But he must prepared to meet the lauded detective.