[Yami no Matsuei/X] The body's sinking bones (PG-13)

[thuviaptarth]

Title: The body's sinking bones
Author: Thuvia Ptarth
Fandom: Yami no Matsuei/X
Pairings: Hisoka/Tsuzuki (implied), Tatsumi/Tsuzuki (implied, past), Fuuma/Tatsumi (mild)
Rating: PG-13 (adult themes)
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Length: 3200 words
Beta: By edonohana, mistressrenet, and rushthatspeaks, so long ago they've probably forgotten it; but I haven't. Thanks!
Notes: (1) Sometime after Vividcon 2004, boniblithe said that what she really wanted for her birthday was Tatsumi/Fuuma. So here it is, three years late, depressing, and with no sex. Uh. Happy birthday? (2) I am not sure the X and Yami no Matsuei timelines are compatible, but for the purposes of this story, I'm assuming both Fuuma going dark in X and the Kyoto arc in Yami no Matsuei took place in fall or winter 1998. (3) eta: Tatsumi headspace soundtrack: K's Choice, Weak (Skunk Anansie cover); Tom McRae, Human Remains

Summary: The last thing Seiichiro Tatsumi wants is to be granted his heart's desire.

I want small obligations, something lighter
than love or the body's sinking bones.

--Tisha Turk, "Going Under"

--falling through space or water, endlessly falling. Tatsumi's breath bubbles up and away. The bubbles grow bigger the farther away they get; somewhere, up past where he can see, there must be one the size of the earth. He reaches for shadows to slow his fall, but there is no sun here, nor any human-made light, and there are no shadows cast.

Your future is already lost, the princess says in a voice like the murmur of running water. She is very pale and very beautiful, and tiny bells chime on her skirts and sleeves and braids when she raises her head to look at him.

I know, he tells her. The dead have no future.

That's not why. Her blind eyes are mirrors, and he cannot escape his reflection, tinted pink as cherry blossoms. You know how it will end. You know you can't hold him here. One day he'll find some other fire to burn in.

--waking up is like hitting the ground.

*

Before he leaves for his assignment in Tokyo, Tatsumi visits the infirmary. Tsuzuki is alone, but hasn't been so long: there are three new stuffed animals perched on the windowsill by his bed and a wrapped box waiting on Hisoka's neatly made sheets.

"Kurosaki-kun must be better." Tatsumi seats himself in the chair closest to Tsuzuki's bed. "He gets so restless now."

"Oh, no," Tsuzuki says, smiling a little sadly, and not looking up from the paper ribbon he's wrapping around his forefinger. "It's too many people, too close, and he's not strong enough yet to shut them all out." He lets the ribbon spring loose into a banana curl. "He hated that boat, you know, a year ago. It was worse than a city."

Tatsumi reaches out and stills Tsuzuki's restless hands. They feel so familiar underneath his, the softness of the skin and the shape of the bones; he could turn over Tsuzuki's right hand and lift the wrist to his mouth. The scars were always rough under his tongue and Tsuzuki's skin tasted impossibly sweet, not like the salt of human sweat.

The sentiment was always foolish. The scars had not brought them together; shinigami never bear the scars of their deaths. The marks on Tsuzuki's wrist are the older attempts, failed escapes written on his skin. Tsuzuki has made so many attempts to escape.

Tatsumi knows exactly how hot Touda's flames burned; he knows how loosely Tsuzuki held Hisoka, all warmth and no pressure, and how tightly Hisoka clutched him back.

"He'll come back," Tatsumi says quietly, and lets go.

*

Tatsumi spends the next three weeks in Tokyo tracking down a dead boy. It had looked simple enough, back in Meifu: a boy's name had vanished from the register of the living, but the boy hadn't yet appeared in the hall of the dead. He had been the last survivor of his family—mother dead years earlier, father and younger sister more recently—so he might be lingering on earth out of familial duty, or even simple confusion.

Tatsumi questions neighbors, teachers, friends—there are many friends, the boy was popular, but none of them seems to have been particularly close. The boy's home is empty: a temple, a small house, an echoing courtyard. Tatsumi runs shadow-fingers beneath the stones cracked and overturned by recent minor quakes while the elder Gushoshin, his temporary partner, pokes at them with a curious beak. The shadows hold nothing but dust and a crushed cherry blossom, unseasonable but irrelevant. Inside the empty house, the photograph of a blonde woman smiles over withered flowers and an unlit candle. Across the mantelpiece, her daughter smiles back, a pretty girl but too pale, her brother somber behind her. He is not smiling, but his eyes are gentle.

Staking out the boy's home and school proves futile; wherever his ghost lingers, it isn't where he lived. The Gushoshin finds their first clue in the medical records of the boy's father and sister, paid not by relatives but by the Chairman of the CLAMP Academy, whose private physicians had attended the girl before her death: and there the trail ends, because the CLAMP Academy's board deals with the living and the Summons Bureau deals with the dead, and both parties are careful not to let their jurisdictions cross.

"Unsolved case for the file, eh, Tatsumi-san?" The elder Gushoshin sounds hopeful; he misses his library.

"Nonsense," Tatsumi snaps, setting the case file down on his hotel bed. "We simply need a location spell."

They both know that the Bureau's best man for location spells still hasn't been released from the infirmary in Meifu. "Ask Watari for assistance," Tatsumi says at last.

"Never!" The Gushoshin puffs up to twice his usual size. "That—that monster! That unscrupulous, incompetent, irresponsible, imbecilic--"

Tatsumi struggles to hold his temper; it's not really the Gushoshin provoking it. Watari has turned to the Gushoshin as experimental subjects while Tsuzuki is otherwise occupied, and unfortunately Watari's keen scientific mind is not accompanied by a keen understanding of informed consent. When looking threatening and making noise about budget cuts prove ineffective, Tatsumi resorts to haggling: If the Gushoshin will retrieve a location spell from Watari, Tatsumi will make sure that Watari turns his attentions elsewhere for a fortnight.

"And donuts will be included in the budget for the library's departmental meetings for six weeks," the Gushoshin stipulates.

"Three weeks," Tatsumi says.

"Fi—"

Tatsumi pushes his glasses up his nose and lets his mouth tighten.

"Three weeks will be sufficient," the Gushoshin says hastily.

The Gushoshin departs in a puff of cold air and sparks. Tatsumi sits himself in the hotel room's sole armchair and flips through the case file. The folder is stamped URGENT, red ink, no date or signature, only a curious personal stamp like a barbed eye; Tatsumi makes a mental note to send a sharp memo about proper escalation procedure to all likely departments when he returns to Meifu.

The file proves just as unhelpful as it has the past three dozen times Tatsumi's gone through it. Report cards, innoculation records, a copy of the family registry. A photograph of a tall boy with a bland smile and broad shoulders he hasn't yet grown into. Won't ever grow into, Tatsumi corrects himself. Where are you hiding, Fuuma Monou?

The elder Gushoshin appears without warning, hovering; his beak holds the handles of a paper bag from one of Kyoto's most famous bakeries. Tatsumi lifts the handles from the Gushoshin's beak and parts the pink tissue paper, which still smells of powdered sugar, to find two blue-and-white origami sparrows, interlocked. They're not Watari's work.

"I didn't bother him," the Gushoshin blurts out, before Tatsumi can speak. "I went looking for Watari, but he wasn't in his office, he was visiting Tsuzuki, and Tsuzuki volunteered, Hisoka said the distraction would do him good--"

Tatsumi rises. "Very well. I suppose it's saved the budget the expense of donuts."

"Tatsumi-san!" wails the Gushoshin. Tatsumi ignores its background pleading as he breaks apart the paired sparrows. Cool paper warms to life in his hands. The sparrows rise up, wings beating hummingbird-fast, circle the room once, then depart out the window in entirely different directions.

The spell-sparrows return after a few moments, swooping past in dazzling and clearly impatient circles. Tatsumi and the Gushoshin stare out the window, and then at each other, in irritation commingled with dismay.

"Perhaps Tsuzuki-san is still feeling unwell?" the Gushoshin ventures.

"One of them must go to the right person," Tatsumi announces, though he is sure of no such thing. "We'll split up. You follow the one to the north and I'll head south. We can meet up by the Diet building at sunset. With any luck," Tatsumi says somewhat grimly, "one or the other of us will be done and ready to head home."

The Gushoshin clucks doubtfully, then flies out the window after its sparrow. Tatsumi takes the stairs and finds that his sparrow is waiting outside the front the door.

The sparrow leads him to an open plaza in Shibuya. In the heart of the plaza, a fountain is playing, celebrating the sudden, unexpected warmth; patches of grimy snow still lurk in shadowed corners, but in the sun the pavements are damp with snowmelt. Tatsumi is overdressed, but not so much that he needs to be invisible; there are salarymen out, even if they're outnumbered by the mothers with young children and the teenagers running in packs. The women all have puffy, too-heavy coats hanging open to reveal summer dresses donned too hopefully too soon, lightweight dresses with tiny straps and flower patterns, hundreds of flowers, as if to inspire the real ones to bloom.

The sparrow flies ahead and swoops in loose lazy circles above the head of a tall boy who tilts back his head to watch it. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt and sunglasses with oval lens tinted red, and for a dead boy he's looking healthy. He stretches out an arm to the sparrow, which lands on the back of his wrist and chirps. The boy twists his arm like a stage magician doing coin tricks: catches the bird in his palm, closes his fingers into a loose fist, opens his fingers to reveal a crumpled twist of paper. He examines the paper for a moment, then drops in the nearest waste basket and strides briskly on.

The plaza is too crowded for a confrontation, so Tatsumi tails the boy at a discreet distance, around the plaza, through a side-street, then another, then another, then--

The boy lounges against the wall of the dead end with a smile as lazy and confident as panther's. His hands are in his pockets: fuda, Tatsumi thinks, or a knife. A knife would be easier. He hopes it's fuda. The aborted struggle with Muraki still tastes sour; he'd like to work off the memory.

"I assumed you'd rather talk in private," the young man says. He may be Kurosaki-kun's age, but this close it's impossible to think of him as a boy; he has a man's height, a man's assured stance. He's a little taller than Tatsumi even, his shoulders a little broader. It doesn't matter. It's daylight and there are shadows everywhere.

"Thank you," Tatsumi says. There's no point in pretending ignorance, and no point in drawing this out any further. "I'm looking for Fuuma Monou."

The young man smiles at him. His sunglasses are set far enough down his nose that Tatsumi can see his eyes crinkle.

"Fuuma Monou is dead."

"Yes," Tatsumi says patiently. "That's why I'm looking for him."

It's such a knowing smile that it sends chills down Tatsumi's spine. "Seiichiro Tatsumi," Monou says, "go home. This is no concern of the dead."

"Then it's no concern of yours, Monou-kun," Tatsumi snaps. "I speak for Enma, Lord of the Dead, who summons you to judgment."

"Enma has no jurisdiction over me," Monou says, "and I am not here to be judged."

Tatsumi has forgotten how tedious it is to apprehend Enma's runaways. He lets anger color his voice as he gathers shadows in his left hand. "Surrender yourself, Fuuma Monou."

"But I've already told you, Seiichiro," the young man says pleasantly. "Fuuma Monou is dead."

Tatsumi tosses shadows over Monou's arms with an impatient gesture, then pulls them tight, jerking Monou's hands out of his pockets as if the other man were a marionette on strings. Jerks harder than he intends: Monou doesn't resist at all, not even when Tatsumi pulls his hands open to reveal empty palms. No fuda, no knife.

Monou's mouth quirks in a half-smile. "Did you think I needed a weapon to fight you?" He pushes himself off the wall at last, and walks through Tatsumi's shadows as if they're--

--shadows.

Tatsumi's shadows shred and peel, falling like unraveled fishing nets; he grabs at them, too astonished to think, and looks up only in time to see Monou lift an empty hand and throw him backward into a wall. The impact feels like it knocks his spine out of place, his breath out of his lungs, and it's pure instinct that smashes the earth apart beneath Monou's feet. The boy leaps backward out of reach of crashing rock; pebbles tumble loose into the chasm Tatsumi's opened in the street.

Monou is laughing, poised on the teetering chasm-edge. He's lost his sunglasses somewhere and he looks absurdly carefree without them. "Seiichiro, Seiichiro, can you possibly think the earth is yours?"

He sounds confident and mocking and all too much like Kazutaka Muraki. Furious, Tatsumi sends shadows crashing down, tearing apart the ground where – Fuuma Monou no longer stands. The buildings around him groan and creak and somewhere in the distance women are shrieking. "Earthquake—it's an earthquake--"

It is possible that this is a worse disaster than any mission Tsuzuki's ever been on, but at the moment Tatsumi doesn't care. Shadows hiss and spit darkness like a fire throwing off sparks.

"Done yet?" Monou says from behind him, and Tatsumi whirls and throws the punch with all the force physical and magical that he can command.

He is probably more surprised than Monou when he connects. Monou staggers back. Tatsumi shoves him without thinking, then shoves him again, falls on him or with him to the ground, like a child in a kindergarten quarrel, and then punches him in the face, once, twice. "You--" Tatsumi gasps for breath. He pulls his arm back again. "You--" The face bruising beneath his blows is pale, much too pale, the eyes wide and crazed and inhuman. Tatsumi gapes at Muraki's mocking smile.

Tatsumi's arm aches, pulled back for a blow he never delivers. Instead of punching he blinks, wipes off the blood blurring his vision. It's not Muraki, not Muraki's smile; the eyes are so sad, the smile so sweet. Tatsumi chokes on horror, closing a desperate fist in the long black hair.

"Oh, Sei-chan," his mother says sadly. "Oh, my darling boy, do you hate me so much?"

Tatsumi's fist spasms, tightening then loosening, and he scrambles off her, backward, awkward, scuttling like a spider. "No. No--"

"It's all right." Tsuzuki smiles up at him despite the tears. "I deserve it."

The wall against his back is all that keeps Tatsumi upright. Get away, he thinks, I've got to get away from this, and blindly he reaches for shadows to pull the wall down. Fuuma Monou stops him with nothing more than the weight of his hand, transfixing Tatsumi like a butterfly pin. Tatsumi's hands twitch, held up like a criminal's; every muscle in his body convulses and fails to pull him free. Blood falls into his left eye and Tatsumi blinks and blinks and cannot blink it away.

"I'm no longer Fuuma Monou," the young man says, "and I already told you. My affairs are no concern of the dead."

"You—why do you look like—"

"Ah?" The man who is no longer Fuuma Monou cocks his head, faintly surprised now, or curious. He looks nothing like Tsuzuki. He looks everything like Tsuzuki.

"Of course. Even dead men dream." Monou thumbs Tatsumi's bruised cheek so gently it almost doesn't hurt; smoothes a slow, sticky trail of blood to his mouth. Tatsumi breathes shallowly against the pressure and fights every instinct that tells him to bite. "Tell me, Seiichiro: what do you wish for?"

It would have been so much easier if Tsuzuki had died in Touda's flames. So much easier.

Tatsumi closes his eyes in defeat. "Something I don't have to protect."

Monou lifts his hand and steps back. His smile looks rueful, but then a moment ago his smile looked like Tsuzuki's. "Go home, Seiichiro. The dead aren't my concern any more than the living are yours."

*

Tatsumi is waiting for the Gushoshin in front of the Diet building, looking down at the mirror image of the familiar pond, when his cell phone rings. Konoe is apologetic: bureaucratic mix-up, orders from Enma-O. "The Summons division never should have been involved," Konoe rumbles in his ear, basso counterpoint to the phone's high staticky whine.

Tatsumi removes his glasses and rubs at his eyes. He is tired, suddenly; exhausted; vertiginous. His closed eyelids are red (as blood) as ink, pulsing with the pressure of his thumbs. Involuntarily, he remembers looking back at the pale curve of Tsuzuki's shoulder when he left him sleeping, that last time. For a moment he is not sure where he is, or what he'll see when he opens his eyes; he feels suspended in space, or falling, or floating in water, all senses fallen silent, his balance confounded.

"—too late to stop the Gushoshin," Konoe continues, "it came back feathers rumpled, complaining about the boy it found, now we've got a diplomatic incident to smooth down--"

This pond isn't the mirror of the pond in Meifu, Tatsumi realizes; the pond in Meifu is the mirror of it. The world Tatsumi knows isn't the solid world, just the shadow cast. He is comfortable there, in the world of shadows; surely he will be comfortable there once he returns. This disquiet is only the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a dead man with no purpose in the living world.

*

Tatsumi buys presents for the entire department, cakes and cookies and sweets, and takes the cream puffs to the infirmary himself. When Tsuzuki bites into the first one, he closes his eyes and hums a small, wordless puppy noise. He makes a mess, of course, and ends up licking the cream off his fingers, as unself-conscious as a child.

"Thank you, Tatsumi!" Tsuzuki beams at him, powdered sugar on his nose. "Here, you should have one."

The pastry flakes off in Tatsumi's hands, in his mouth, almost too light to taste.

*

He dreams of that endless space again, but not of falling. He is walking this time, walking on what feels like solid ground, although circles ripple out from each footfall as if his steps were pebbles dropped in water. Stars spangle the dark and above his head glass globes bob in invisible currents, glowing silver and gold.

He is searching for the tiny princess, calmly at first, expecting to find her after the next turn or below the next step, but every pale glimmer in the corner of his eye vanishes when he turns to look. Panic builds up in his throat, in his useless hands. He means to call out to her, but he doesn't know her name, and he finds himself shouting for someone else instead.

He cannot find her and he cannot find Tsuzuki. There is darkness everywhere and shadows nowhere, and no one ever answers him.