Humidity

A/N: Took a couple of tries, flirting both with gender topics and dogmatic attitudes, and debating how to and not to aggrandize both in this chapter, but here we have it!

Humidity

Chapter VII

Snow Eater

25 January 2012

Neither would stand for the other venturing to the island alone; yet both made the case for why the other needn’t accompany them.  Hiei argued that if he found the Floating Isle he may as well deliver the announcement, and possible invitation, while he was at it, and whether or not Rhui accepted, they could be done with it.  Yukina countered with the suggestion that once his Jagan had pinpointed the location, there was no need for him to actually set foot there, if he didn’t want to.

This consideration made him snort, because if, in his inward obtuseness, he had exaggerated her naiveté, this at least indicated that there was something to exaggerate nonetheless.  “I don’t care what those dogmatic icicles think of me,” he told her, in a voice still resolute, for all the weariness it had accumulated after the night’s exhaustive, at times even paralytic, discourse.  “The last time I was there, they cringed and I pitied them.  If their view of me changes because they realize who I am, I’ll unsettle them as the bogeyman they’ve been taught to fear, or as a contradiction to that superstition, and I’ll still pity them.  However they regard me, I’m still me when I leave the ice-maenads behind.”

Yukina furrowed her brow.  “‘Maenads’?”

For all his vocal conviction, his insides mimicked their previous tightness, a probable factor of those nightmares, or hallucinations, that he had just accidentally alluded her to.  Setting his mouth in a line too tight for genuine dismissal, he shrugged ineffectively, and said in badly feigned nonchalance, because the night was long and he was tired, “I’ve been ill.  Deluded.  Over my … lover,” he pronounced, wincing against those echoed contractions of feeling, churned up by that referral to Kurama, whose uncertainty was then to him still unresolved.  Too many ambiguous prefixes. 

“And,” he pushed on, “over my sister.”

That, at least, he managed to expel without hesitation, though after the last syllable left his mouth, he still felt the reverberations of that fresh confession—or admission, as it turned out, after hearing her confession—tart on his tongue.

Despite each twin’s reservation about the other’s journey to the island, they did band together, and with a unified voice, thundered a loud and resolute NO to both Kuwabara’s and Kurama’s petitions.

Kuwabara’s was idealistic.  “But I could show them that their ideas about this world and the men in it are wrong!” he argued, tipping his teacup at a dangerous angle in his agitation.  Calmly Yukina slid a few napkins under where his hand hovered—for the sake of the Kuwabara family’s tabletop—, while he continued to vent: “Geez, would I want to marry you and build a life with you if I were really just some, some…”

“Rapacious embodiment of patriarchal oppression,” offered Kurama from across the table.

“Yeah!” Kuwabara affirmed, then made a face.  “That.”

Hiei, who until then had been drinking his tea, and when done with that, tactilely pondered the indentions in his cup’s form where previously other fingers had molded it from clay, finally set it down; and rolling his eyes, broke his silence: “And surely you, the great ningen hope, with all your talk of honor and being a man, will single-handedly wipe clean generations of engrained, paranoid…”

“Nationalized battered wife syndrome,” Kurama concluded when he faltered.

He looked at the Fox, who stoically gazed into his own cup.  “Something like that.”

“Uh.”  Kuwabara glanced toward a room down the hall, though its usual inhabitant wasn’t home.  “Should I bring my sister, to show I’m for real?”

Yukina laughed, but shook her head.  “It’s not that simple, Kazuma.  As soon as they heard how we met, they would treat it as a story that reinforces their point of view.”

“But—”

“Kuwabara,” Kurama interjected thoughtfully, “consider that the complaints that these women brought to their isle and insulated themselves with, aren’t wholly inane.  You might tell their matrons that you will marry Yukina, and in their eyes that marriage may be nothing more than you asserting your rights over her as your property—and whatever your true feelings and intentions,” he added, calmly but swiftly—as Kuwabara’s face began to contort with indignation—“there would be nothing you could do to demonstrate those.  Meanwhile, they will think what they want to think, and it will probably be the worst.”

Kuwabara closed his mouth, and said nothing more for his case, but the unnatural setting of his jaw spoke his frustration loud and clear.

Skeptically Hiei looked at Kurama.  “And what can you demonstrate?”

Kurama shook his head.  “I’ll save the pedagogy for consorting with the former human eaters.”

Consorting.  Hiei pursed his lips at the provocative phrasing, intentionally chosen, if the oh so slight, wicked curve of Kurama’s mouth was any indicator.

“My concerns are more practical,” the Fox continued.  “Namely, how might these women react when a fallen sister’s deviant children come only, in their eyes, to flaunt apostasy in their faces?  You two would be alone, and outnumbered.”

Idly Hiei flexed the fingers of his right hand, then the hand itself, then his arm.  The skeptical look persevered.  “Do you really think,” he challenged, “that I can’t hold my own against some glacier of women, isolated and unmissed?”

Evenly Kurama replied, “Would you, though?”

Hiei narrowed his eyes, and flatly retorted, “Without a second thought, if need be.”

During their discussion Yukina’s features had sunk into an increasingly uncomfortable expression, and now she tugged her lips, shook her head, and said, “No, they’re not like that.  They’re strict, but they’re not vindictive—or, even if they are, it’s not because they are…” She pursed her mouth into something resembling a collapsed grimace.  “They’re scared.”

“True,” Kurama conceded.  “But even if you’ve strayed, you’re still an ice maiden.  They retained your mother while expelling your brother.  If they took violent offense, perhaps they would preserve you out of hopes that you might repent, or out of punishment if you did not.  But if for whatever reason Hiei missed the opportunity to defend himself…”

While Hiei could have expressed offense, he instead chortled, and guessed, “And if, for whatever reason, we didn’t rejoin the general demon population in a timely enough manner—Gandhara might make the isle into an unwilling satellite?  Or perhaps the surrounding skies suddenly, strategically become infested with toxic floating fungus pods—or something like that?”

Neutrally Kurama rejoined, “Perhaps, something like that.”

Yukina and Kuwabara both gave him concerned, puzzled looks, as though deliberating whether or not his threats were real.

Unperturbed, Hiei smirked, and said dismissively, “His ‘practical concerns’ are just as unrealistic as Kuwabara’s idealistic ones.”  To Kurama: “But if you’re going to toss and turn until we reemerge, wait for me in Gandhara, and I’ll come pay my respects to those newlyweds when we’re done.”

While Kurama returned his smirk, distorted into the form of conditional acquiescence, Kuwabara furrowed his brow in confusion.  “Uh, what newlyweds?”

“An old friend and a distant relation,” the other redhead answered.  Eyeing Hiei, he added, “And technically speaking, that terminology could be misleading; no actual wedding took place.”

“Neither will ours,” Yukina jumped in, looking at Kuwabara.  “Not if someone doesn’t stay to plan it.  Unless you want to turn control of everything over to Shizuru…”

At that, Kuwabara made a strained sound in the back of his throat, and his face made a corresponding expression.  “She would like that.  She’s been treating the whole thing like it’s her getting to give me away to Yukina or something, which doesn’t even make sense because she’s not getting rid of either of us until we find a place to move out of here to!”  He sloped his eyebrows into the curve of his palm; and across the table, Hiei, out of consideration for Yukina, fought the curve of a threatening sneer.

That is, until Kuwabara, evidently recovered swiftly, lifted his face from his hand and said to Kurama, “Oh by the way, would it be possible to get your landlord’s number?”

The sneer grew flaccid of its own accord.  Yukina’s topic of deferment wound up working so well that even Hiei, who would still be going to seek the isle, thought less on the more daunting prospects of the upcoming expedition, than he did on what to him was the more gut-freezing possibility of his future brother-in-law (gut-freezing in itself, but an inevitability he had to digest) also becoming his neighbor.  

 

***

 

And so the children of Hina returned to the Floating Isle of the Koorime, unaccompanied as per their desires, unaided save for one thing Kurama pressed on them.  Hiei accepted it, though he doubted its necessity.  It was intended to “ensure a smoother departure,” or so Kurama said.  “Smooth”: a texture that Hiei found incongruous with the entire nature of this trip.

In his opinion, the closest this could come to “smooth” would be slippery—as indeed the first woman to discern the two prodigal forms apart from the howling gusts of snow that blew every which way, lost her footing, and sprawled in a drift before them. 

Perhaps it was the time taken to recover her stance, coincidental with the time and space closed as they approached; or a delayed reaction on her part, that took her so long to look from one twin to the other, and then to focus on Hiei; a realizing what he was—and perhaps even who he was, much as her superiors might have tried to degrade him to the status of thing—uttered a surprised, scandalized yelp that almost ran away on the wind.

Yukina pushed tangled forelocks out of her face, and asked the woman, “Are you hurt?”

Straightening up, she shook her head, and though she still stared at Hiei, she addressed Yukina: “You’re Hina’s daughter.”

“I am.”  Yukina inclined her head towards Hiei.  “This is my brother.”

For his part, Hiei was content to let Yukina speak for him, and let his features rest naturally on his face, as menacing or nonmenacing as that may have appeared to the woman.  Who started again, and whose complexion momentarily took on a translucent quality that Hiei supposed was a phenomenon attributable to when the fairest of the fair blanch; and immediately after, took on a gray hue that he doubted was ever meant to be natural. 

The only outward sign he betrayed in recognition of her reaction to him, was a slight flare of his nostrils, numbed by this point to tactile sensations, but still acute to the suddenly new presence of a sharp, ammoniac smell.  He was not surprised, as he had encountered that involuntary greeting too when he had returned the last time.  Neither did he fault her for it—her in particular, for though he did not know who she was, he did know her as one of those women who held back Hina on the cliff.  That knowledge, and her reaction, affirmed in his mind that Yes, she knew exactly who he was.

Though he maintained his features numb as the cold, somewhere in Hiei’s mind, at least a few neurons tingled in pleasure—call it perverse or vindicated—as he broke his silence, and said, “We’re looking for Rhui.”

She might have swooned, but didn’t.  Instead, she turned terrified eyes off of Hiei, and set outraged ones on Yukina.  “It wasn’t enough that you left to look for him, you had to bring him back to destroy us all?!  Yukina, why?!”

Whatever Yukina might have felt from that accusation, her features remained placid, a display of the same exercise performed by Hiei, who countered: “I brought her here, and we’re looking for Rhui.”

She did swoon then, one knee buckling as she staggered backward.  She stayed where she dropped this time, and while she didn’t move to aid them as they moved forward, for fear or loathing or both, neither did she move to stop them, for perhaps those same reasons.

Icicled dwellings came into view, though they saw no people (women, Hiei mentally specified; women and girls) yet.  As they walked, he glanced over at Yukina.

Who said calmly, with her gaze kept ahead, “I was prepared for that sort of greeting.  Even if I’d come alone, I was prepared for that in the village, once I told them why I came.”

Hiei nodded, and looked forward again.  “Then I’ll let you do the talking.”  They were close enough now that he could easily see the silhouettes of apparitions, if not yet their features.

Once their features were distinguishable, they were all variations of those expressed by the woman from before: the terror and betrayal of damsels damned, and he their dragon.  He had encountered this all before, and had expected no less this time.  The only incongruity this time around, was the added puzzle of Yukina, whose place at least she seemed sure of, as no one else was, Hiei included. 

And when finally they encountered two visages—the two that Hiei had expected—that treated his appearance with neither horror nor surprise, but a knowing resignation, it was to her that they diverted that reaction they withheld from him.  Their cause, Yukina’s return, was shared, and easily discernable; their individual sentiments behind it, less so.

Word of their coming must have preceded them, even if by not much.  Hiei sincerely doubted that they would otherwise find the woman who led the condemnation of their mother’s actions, and the woman she had forced into the role of executor, gathered side by side in a place of prominence in the village square; obviously they were set up to receive the residue of that punishment enacted already two decades past.  Rhui eyed both twins with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, while the Koorime elder, no less wrinkled than when Hiei had seen her last, looked at both of them, Hiei particularly, as though they were that elemental mix on the edge of a trail, the product of snow melting but not quite thoroughly mixing into the earth, that no one wanted to step or slip into. 

Appropriately, the elder by-stepped Hiei in her vision, and focused on Yukina.  “I see that you’ve fulfilled your quest to find the abomination,” she said gravely.  “Though you’ve done so without fortune or our blessings.”

“I was fortunate to find him, Elder,” Yukina quietly dissented.

The crone pursed her lips.  “Your time in the wilderness did not strip you of your innocence,” she opined.  “That is a blessing and a curse, and it is the curse of the Emiko that allowed you to find him, so that you could lead him back here to destroy us.  That may not have been your intention, but it is the nature of the beast.”

While the implied “beast” stood stoically at her side, Yukina furrowed her brow, shook her head, and said, “It was not in his nature to destroy me, though he found me and knew me before I knew him.”

Hiei felt the eyes of an entire village on them, the impure elements, and felt that the thick calm that surrounded them, and to this point led the dialogue between maiden and crone, was as the eye of the storm.  He looked from them to the woman who, for Yukina at least, had been a stand-in mother.  Rhui met his gaze, and in that moment both exchanged an anticipation of the coming turbulence.

As expected: “He has deceived you,” the old woman insisted, her voice growing gravelly as it rose in volume.  “You are the instrument of his revenge; he needed you to show him the way back so that he can annihilate this place, and all of us in it!”

And though he had expected it, Hiei was startled out of his composure nonetheless, when Yukina in turn broke hers, and raised her voice:

“He brought me back because I didn’t know the way!” she mimicked his retort to the woman on the path previously.  “And he is Hiei, and if he ever deceived me, it was by keeping his relation to me a secret, for fear of me catching the taint that you forced on him.”  She pressed her lips into a thin line, for a moment resembling her much older counterpart, as regards obstinacy at least, and then parted them, concluding: “The only reason he came back now is because I did, and neither of us plan to stay.  I am going to marry a human.”

This exchange had been the welling irritant, and now the eye of the storm blinked.  All around them Hiei heard scandalized exhalations, aimed at them like a thousand little shards of ice.  The frozen women of the village now stared, not at Hiei, but at his companion that they had—had—counted as one of their own.  Rhui also changed her focus, the confusion on her face now overcast by the anxiety.

And the elder, for her part, looked aggreived, and closed her eyes as though exhausted.

“Hina has cursed us two-fold,” she pronounced.  “If you two do not return to deliver a clean kill, then you come to torture us, and make us wish for death.”

Silence hung over them, heavier than a fog, and Hiei felt an inner tension akin to those previous attacks, that had started when he first learned of his sister’s intentions, and ended—ostensibly—when he had learned of his sister’s knowledge as his sister.  His sister, who had known torture more literal than the old crone’s pathetic rhetoric; and who now stood under fire, partly on his account.  He took a deep breath, which was far less liberating in conjunction with bracing one’s system against the antiseptic cold…

And let it out prematurely, when not he, but Rhui, broke the silence:

“Elder,” she spoke hesitantly.  “I know you’re sure that Hina’s son means us all ill, but you must know that he returned to us once before, and harmed no one.”  She stared at Hiei hard, and continued cautiously: “I believe he actually left with the intention of finding his sister and securing her from harm.  If the stories of the other Koorime sons are true, then I think that Hiei may be an exception.”

Her face took on a pained expression, especially at the pronouncement of his name.  Whether from some guilty feeling of being beholden to him, or the stress that accompanied breaking face with a Koorime of higher order, Hiei didn’t know.  Thoughtfully he considered her conflicted visage, and then said, “She wanted to invite you to the wedding.”

He could hear Yukina’s thick swallow beside him, and then the strained affirmative, “It’s true, Rhui.  It’s why I came here.”

While Rhui looked at her, that conflicted expression on her face further enunciated for its silence, the elder made a disgruntled noise.  “Nonsense!” she croaked.  “Rhui, Hina’s daughter has strayed, not as her mother did, but worse.  She would try to sanctify her waywardness in the barbarous institutions of the outside world, and snare you in it.  Do not be pulled in as mother and daughter have been!”

Hiei listened, watching the maiden condemned, and the one admonished.  Both maintained individual expressions, but also a reluctance toward motion, or emotion.  Frozen women, numbed by the censure of that chilly abbess, all for contact with the son. 

Who watched, and remembered, and suddenly stirred the stillness with a soft “Heh”; followed by the vaguely amused murmur, “Fuck you, Kurosawa.”

Promptly the crone’s attention snapped to him.  “What?”

Hiei shook his head as though from a dream, and for the first time, looked her full in the face, and raised his voice.  “What you don’t know could fill an entire world.  If you have gone into it, you haven’t thawed your mind to anything you encountered.  How pitiable.”  Glancing aside at Yukina, he murmured, “Do what you like, but I feel we’re treading circles to nowhere now.”

Blinking, she turned her head, and returned his gaze, and nodded.  “Yes, I think it’s time to go, too.”  And each turning inward before stepping out and around, the children of Hina began their procession away from their mother’s people, in a matter-of-factly defiant volte-face.

“… Wait.”

Which froze in its tracks, as each sibling stopped short, having heard that minute, that soft but so substantial imploration, and turned their eyes where their ears had been.

Deliberately not looking at the elder, or any of her “sisters” around her, but straight ahead at them, Rhui took her first steps forward.  And Yukina smiled, while Hiei maintained a neutral countenance, as Rhui’s steps never staggered, and never slowed, but carried her steadily onward, to the point that once they had resumed their trek out of hostile territory, she had already fallen in step with them by the village’s edge. 

“Don’t listen to them, Yukina,” Rhui murmured.  Though every second they put more distance between themselves and the women who welcomed none of them, they could still hear shards of icy hisses aimed their way; an anthem of anathema, and they the ones damned.

“I stopped listening to them a while ago,” Yukina replied evenly.  There wasn’t a note of either muster or suppression in her tone; her indifference to the condemnation was genuine and free, and Hiei was glad to hear, glad to know.  So much so…

“Uh—Hiei?” Yukina said, an uncertainty tingeing her voice where it hadn’t a moment before.  No cause for concern, however, at least not for him, as he knew it came from seeing him, suddenly grinning in the snow and cold.

“Heh.”  He shook his head to dissipate her concerns, and continued walking.  They weren’t far from their method of departure: a large plant, with leaves that when unfurled might act as gliders; that held up resilient to these inhospitable winds, maintained with thanks to the energy of the demon who had supplied it.  Or, more aptly, had forced it onto Hiei, so insistent that he would need it, so confident that he would encounter the dilemma of leaving the Isle with one more woman than he had gone with, and wanting to ensure that the descent would be no more precarious than it had to.  And Hiei had chosen to give in, and accept the supplies he knew he’d have to take either way, anyway. 

And aware of the curious gaze—no, gazes—directed into his back now, he chose to elaborate:

“Kurama told me a story, not long ago.  Once there was a Snow Queen…” 

 

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A/N: I wasn’t sure whether I should present the confrontation between Hiei and Yukina and the Koorime in this story at all, and actually right up to posting the previous chapter, thought I’d just skip ahead to the wedding, and summarize the events that take place in this chapter.  However, since I summarized the aftermath of Hiei’s coming out to Yukina, I felt I couldn’t skim over this too, otherwise that would just be me being lazy, haha.

 Deciding to actually narrate instead of referring back to this chapter did, of course, present the issues of how to present it.  As it turned out, it was presenting everyone aside from the twins, but especially Rhui (and more especially, not overdramatizing her), that required the most time and thought.  This chapter actually might have been done and posted three weeks ago, but for that time spent deliberating on the last eight or nine paragraphs in particular. 

So, let me know if I did a good job, if you’re so inclined!  Or if I did a bad job and it absolutely sucked—whatever.  There’s a last chapter/epilogue still in store that I believe will be much easier to write than the second scene of this chapter was, so it’ll be along soon!