Disclaimer: If I owned Shaman King… Takei would be held in a building somewhere and made to write a proper ending for it:D Although I suppose that'd be expecting a bit much; there are some things not even owning the world will get you.
Author's Note: Ack! So sorry, I'm overdue again. –embarrassment- I got caught up in writing something else and by the time I got round to this I had lost all inspiration for this. I ended up writing this in two sittings, and it shows, I suppose, in its lack of length and overuse of synonyms. Also, I think I now have a beta, and I should send chapters to her in the future, but I just wanted to get this up as soon as I could.
So: celebrate with me. Yay, beta!
The chapter title is a little off-key and uninspired, I know, but I rather like it, myself. -grin- Read on and see why, I suppose.
Also, if the font is a little peculiar, forgive me; I'm on a strange computer.
Chapter Fourteen: An Unexpected Death
As a child, Anna had laughed at him – not with amusement or contempt, but the blankness of a girl who had not the artistry (yet) to make silences, twist them and rend them as if they were clay. He was not a fighter, this child made of sticks and an awkward dreamer's smile that had never quite fit. But he had learned, over the years – too much.
As the figure leered up in flares of distorted shadows, he danced back until he forcibly struck the door, rocking on his heels as he put a hand to the side to steady his crouch, his other outflung, prepared to summon furyoku at an instant's notice; raw and malleable like purposeless static.
(He had all the mannerisms of a fighter now; and was not one still. The fighter's grace that he had learned, with great difficulty, from his fiancé was useless without the energy to support it, and he had none of that; no spirit, even at sixteen, which made him the shame of the Asakuras, hidden like some ugly secret in the closet with the rest of the skeletons and horrors that all shaman families possessed.)
The creature stepped forward. In moments his features resolved; from grotesquely warped like the countenance of a leviathan from the deep to something familiar from the shaman's memories. This was who had bandaged his childhood battle scars, had moved in from Germany and stood by all the while to smile.
He was no longer smiling now, the color of his eyes deformed and swollen with crimson veins that were black in the moonlight. His doctor's coat was open, whipping and flaring with an obscene life as the night wind breezed through it and past it. Unconsciously, the wavering specter put forth tender fingers, drawing the heavy white oilskin about the slim figure nestled against his chest and his cradling embrace. A name was on his lips, dripping from his tongue in slick strikes that bypassed hearing and understanding and left Yoh a little bemused, with a twisting, writhing dread at his stomach that did not touch his eyes.
"Faust?" He said, and the name came as more question than he had intended. The gathering furyoku in his cupped hand dissolved as he spoke, a spill of wastefulness that Anna was not about to condemn.
The doctor looked up. In the harshness of the moonlight, his eyes were violently black, the whites of his eyes aging yellow as he stumbled into the fragment of light from within the house. The outline in his arms lolled about with too much laxness, and a long lock flashed buttery gold beneath the light. (She was beautiful and still, some daintily crafted doll who could be set before a sculptor and make that sculptor despair for his lack of skill, his inability to make something so precious that a person could look at her controlled, highbred features and feel their heart ache for something they would never have.) And as the illumination spilled relentlessly over her long, elegant face, Yoh realized that her eyes were closed, and the only movements that pervaded her were the elder man's wild, clumsy gesticulations, and the slow, sticky trickle of something crimson over her cheek…
"Help her." The shaman said hoarsely, thrusting her forward. Yoh did not flinch away, only stood, looking steadily at the older man with an expression that he himself might not have recognized. "She—car—" He drew in a quick, rapid breath, efficient and careful with the manner of a physician regarding the practicalities. "An accident. A car—" He clenched his fingers beneath her head before loosening them again to gently cradle the base of her skull. "You are a shaman, as I am. Help me." His eyes stared appealingly up towards the boy, though his lips were thin as though he did not trust him to understand the urgency of this. He had, Yoh recalled, always thought of the boy as someone frivolous, lazy and languid with none of the power that might have excused such a demeanor. And he had been, but still that was no excuse for that he did not hide it; had never hidden it and left the shaman with his smiling, soft contempt. "She needs help – you were closest, and—"
Yoh spoke. "I can't."
The former's violet gaze flickered over his own smooth black ones, and the shaman thought that he might have seen another two or three veins flicker into being within those eyes; savagely without understanding like those of an animal's."Help her!" He said again wildly, his voice rising with an edge like a knife jagged and none of the professional finesse that the boy had associated with the doctor. "Help her—you have power, I've always seen it, help her. My shaman powers aren't enough—" he tore at his hands furiously, shook so badly that Eliza's body trembled as though she were alive again, seeing the scene arrayed before her like a drama that could be played to no good end. "Please—you have strength enough to restore her to life, you could, you could—"
"I can't." Dark eyes flicked to meet the doctor's, then away again. He thought of his grandmother, who had once neatly bandaged his grandfather's leg when he had tripped and fallen over the stairs, of his mother, whom he saw very little of, but who spoke of his father with a wry, charming smile. And he thought of the man before him, bloodied and but unharmed, so unharmed that all the doctor's training he had ever received had flown out of his mind so that a pulse still beat as strongly within illusion as it ever had in reality. (He thought – did not think – of a girl who had slapped him as a child for being impertinent, who had caught at his hand with her own when he was fourteen and told him that he was being a child over his bleeding fingers, and who was there still, untouchable.)
"You do! You must!" The doctor all but screamed the words, voice speared with an edge of hysteria that had never before been present in his tones. "You must—I can't live without her—you must bring her back… I'll give anything, anything—"
"I told you that I can't, Faust." As the blond man raised his gaze, he saw Yoh's own features, lit with some inner softness that was tragic and simultaneously beautiful. "Few can raise the dead so that they are alive again. There are necromancers and there are charlatans out there who will say it is easy, that it is only a matter of power and power enough, but that isn't it. No one can bring the dead back to life again – it's never been power, but-"
"Power." Whispered Faust. "It is a matter of power enough, and you have it." He bowed his head towards the cold, limp figure between his arms, and Yoh saw his shoulders, shaking. Carefully, delicately so that the woman in his arms would not be shaken nor dislodged, he knelt with some difficulty in the pool of blackening crimson spreading about his ankles. (Yoh, opening the door faintly, saw her legs; crushed so that fragments of bones jutted out like sinful citadels in a swirling bloody pulp.)
"Please." Said the doctor. (And he recalled that this was Faust, who did not beg as a matter of engrained assurance, and shivered with that remembrance: Faust did not beg, and yet here he was on his knees, offering everything he had ever had for the fragments of a chance..) "Please. Bring her back, whole and well, and I will give you anything you ask. There are rituals I have heard of." He drew in a sharp, deep breath as if the words would drain the air from him and leave him suspended, without enough in him to gasp a cry, "I will let you have my life if only you will bring her back again."
There was madness in his eyes, and what could Yoh understand of madness that did not release him, madness that seemed to flare up? He might have pretended to, once, but he thought of Tamao and his heart was small and cold and whispered only of a devotion that he could not match; and of Anna, of a flaming star who had all the world to grace and not simply a boy who had never loved her. Nevertheless, he tried: "Shaman powers are a matter of nature, not of—"
He saw the careful, wary movements of the other man, but did not think of his actions until he felt the bright, harsh pain against his mouth, the bones (padded by skin) clacking hard against the teeth past his closed lips. Faust drew his hand back and looked at it numbly; in the unwavering severity of the lights in the corridor, the crimson that splattered the back of the shaman's hand was black like traces of ink, writings of words that were better off not spoken.
Yoh touched his bruised mouth numbly, eyes never leaving that of his older companion.
"Heartless." Said the doctor softly, and lapsed into German speech that the dark-haired boy did not understand but thought had the softness of a quotation. Then, with the uneasiness of an alien nature, he fell back into the familiarity of speech that Yoh had known all his life, though the words that he said then were hardly any better than when he had spoken in tongues and the boy had caught the razor-sharp intent behind them. "Lifeless, loveless – how could I have expected you to understand? You, who have never loved, who has only had mistresses and masters in a relentless procession. You, who have loved as a matter of convenience and self-satisfaction – how could I expect you to understand?" He was nearing gentleness now, and his expression was oddly pitying, the fragility of crystals.
The younger shaman was silent still, his hand at his mouth to stem the blood, his eyes fixed upon Faust as if he thought that he might find the secret answer to his questions there. Then, he said, with the a careful thickness, "I can't bring her back." and was silent again.
"I see." The doctor said, voice frosted and rimed with ice. The words broke a little, but their syllables glittered with the sharp hardness of glass, jagged and broken in needlepoint splinters. His speech was accented as it had always been, but with a clipped dignity, rather than the soft overbreath that he had used before. He struggled a little, rising to his feet – Yoh moved forward to aid him instinctively, but the doctor held him off, and the warning flare within those violet eyes, abruptly turned to a wintry hostility, stopped him.
"You won't." He said, and for a moment Yoh thought, with the strange, mad illogic of the moment, that he meant that he wouldn't help him rise again. But Faust went on, and his words clarified, though they did nothing to lighten the deepening unease at the pit of his stomach. "You can—I see the power; it's always been my strength, to see things—but you won't." And he dropped his chin, fitting it to the small notch at his collarbone, though the shaman thought that his eyes never left that piteous, crushed girl in his arms.
"But if you can…" the doctor said softly, his tones strangely musing. A gloved hand emerged, the white silk stained with sticky scarlet fading to rust, stroking the line of her cheek with a peculiar tenderness that squirmed at the back of the boy's mind discomfortingly. "Well, it shouldn't be impossible. All I need to do is become stronger, stronger than you." His eyes came up again levelly and fixed upon Yoh's own, yet did not see them; glazed with despair.
When he spoke again, his voice was hard, his eyes refracting that same callousness with the kind of pressure that might create diamonds.
"I will see you again, Yoh. Count on it."
And, turning neatly upon his heel, he exited the yard, Eliza's corpse cradled tenderly in his arms, warm as though she were still alive.
Author's Note: And there we have tension! –triumph- (Although only Faust x Eliza romance. Those of you who were expecting something else, my sincere apologies and I will throw chocolates at you if necessary.) There was a reason this was one of my favorite chapters, you know. –laughs- The next chapter's title (tentatively set, although I've had this planned for a while) is called Just a Day. Props to anyone who can guess what song lyrics I snatched it from – you'll probably guess what the next chapter's about, too, if you manage it.
On a more important note, my Internet has broken down. I am currently on dial-up and still posting updates; the next one should be next Friday, with luck.
Also, my hit counter struck over 1300 viewers –100 for each of the previous two chapters alone. All I can say is – wow. I'm rather happy that anyone could re-read that chapter that often. Thank you so much:) And now for replies…
Review Replies:
Satori-chan: Well of course. :P You can't imagine how much time it takes to get it out of cloth, either. –should do an extra scene with Faust and blood and the washing thereof- I'm glad you like it so much, though. :)
asn water: -laughs- Nah, no one's throwing blood at anyone. That'd be kind of weird, though, throwing blood at Yoh. o.O It's just dripping on his porch. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough… -worry-
candee: Well, I left off to start the karaoke chapters at a fairly critical time; I shouldn't think I'd cool it off to suit anyone. :P Also, naturally it's confusing; it's meant to go on for at least another fifteen chapters at the least – it's not going to start settling any time soon. –grins- And I appreciate the long review. :D
azimataiji: Aww, why crying? It's not even anywhere near over yet. And here's the update, although it's admittedly horribly late.
neoKOS-MOS: Yes well, here's more cause for excitement as I appear to be late again, and if I'm on time next Friday you can be excited. :D As will I be. Poor Eliza. –pets her- I've been planning this for ages; am beginning to think when I have time later I should double back and give her the dignity of an on-stage scene of death at the very least.
I don't understand why no one ever uses Ponchi and Conchi. I mean, I've seen fanfics for people I've never even heard of (so far), and yet there's no justification-fic for what're possibly the two most obnoxious spirits in Shaman King-dom.
I really think I overdid the parenthesis this chapter; it's back to something a little less ornate in the next, I hope.
anime-obsession260: Whee, updates. :D Slow, belated updates, true, but updates. Behold!
hannami08: -hee- You like Anna, then – let me pose you a question: would you rather she had a straight pairing or a harem of both Yoh and Hao? Just out of curiosity.
Acrella: All of my Hao x Anna fans seem to dislike the idea of Yoh x Tamao. –grins wryly- I don't understand why you'd want it so, though; Tamao loves Yoh. Admittedly she is a little pink and shy and fuzzy, but I'm not of the opinion that she should be underestimated simply because she's in love. If you've read the HP series, look at Ginny, after all.
Dillpops: Well, it obviously didn't get me thinking very seriously, but I did love writing that piece and look forward to writing another, if only because this gives me some practice, some ability to hint at what's coming.
I'm really not very fond of this writing style; too ornate and full of adjectives for my taste. Still, it's good for practice. X.x;
cherri-chan: -laughs- Nah, Ren would arrive in style, possibly with a small carriage, and drop out of it to bleed on the ground. I don't underestimate Chinese characters; believe me.
Well, Sasuke LOOKS Chinese… -innocent- Although I prefer his brother, myself, if only because of the randomized violence he seems inclined to dole out to various people – there has to be a story of some kind behind that, doesn't there?
Paku Romi did a fantastic job, and look at her resume; she seems to have had a part in every major anime ever to cross the screen and the oceans to America.
Nevermindme: Ah, but who can resist the challenge of inserting a small backbone into an insipid character? She is, after all, a Shaman, and I can't recall one that didn't have power of one sort or another over things.
maya amano: -suffers tremendously- That was a typo; it's supposed to be itako, the meaning of which I presume you know. :)