Yukina's Story: Firestorm

Characters: Yukina

Pairings: None

Continuity: English anime/Manga/Speculation

Summary: One-shot. Yukina-centric. Young Yukina has always thought she was like the other ice maidens—but her life is about to be transformed by the realization that she very much isn't.

Cold. It was a strange thing, really, for an ice demon to truly experience cold. How could they, when they never felt anything else?

Yukina was different. She always had been, though it had taken a number of years of her demon lifespan to realize just how different she was from the other ice maidens. How could she have known? The cold still didn't bother her. Her thin kimono provided more than enough protection from the storms of her homeland. She had no way of telling the her subjective experience of temperature was different from that of the other residents of the ice lands.

If that were all it had been, she would never have known, and it would never have mattered.

But it wasn't. It wasn't just the temperature that she could feel and recognize, but other kinds of cold as well. She could see the cold looks that her neighbors gave her, long before she knew what they meant. She heard the icy tones in their voices when they spoke of her late mother, and of her mother's great crime. She could feel, almost taste, the frosty waves of hostility and suspicion that were constantly directed at her.

Eventually, she picked up enough pieces to realize exactly what they were suspicious of. They suspected that she was different from all of them. They suspected that she was not fully an ice maiden.

They suspected that she had a father.

They were right.

She could still remember when that realization had come crashing over her, leaving her identity a torn and tattered mess in its wake.

She had suspected for a while, true, but she had somehow managed to keep that possibility locked away in a part of her mind that she never looked in.

Most of the pieces had already come together for her. She knew that her mother's crime had been sleeping with a man—the most taboo act for the all-female koorime species. She knew that this act had resulted in a forbidden son—her brother. She had even known that they had been twins. But she had still clung to the ever-more-shaky certainty that she, Yukina, had been her mother's true koorime daughter, conceived in the normal way, without any outside interference from a man.

That had all changed thanks to a passing comment, something she wasn't even meant to overhear. It was a trivial thing, really, a small detail that had previously escaped her. It shouldn't have meant much to her, and it certainly shouldn't have caused her world to come crashing down in pieces at her feet.

They had been talking about her mother again, old gossip she'd long since learned to ignore. She'd paused to let them move further away on the other side of a row of snow-covered evergreens. They hadn't known she was there, and she had no desire to either reveal her presence or listen further to their conversation.

"—and of course she had to go for the worst of them all. Repulsive fire brute."

Fire.

Yukina's mind closed in on itself, locked on that one concept.

Fire.

She could see it, dancing red and orange in front of her wide, blankly staring eyes as she sank to her knees in the snow. Fire was something she had never seen in her waking life, yet it crackled and jumped in her mind's eye as though it were right in front of her. She could almost feel its heat against her face.

Fire.

The tiny flame that flickered within her heart now roared to life. It had always been there, she knew that now. It was what had made her different from the others. Its faint warmth was what had allowed her to know what cold was. It was her legacy from her father.

She knew. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. She was a child of two parents, a half-breed, a bastard child in a land of truly single mothers. If anything beyond her unusually-colored eyes had differentiated her from the normal ice maidens, she would have been cast out, like her brother.

Her brother…

Guilt consumed her as she realized just how much she had absorbed the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of her neighbors. She had been thankful that she couldn't remember him, relieved that she had never had to deal with someone like him, someone who shouldn't exist.

She had believed he shouldn't exist, had accepted the elders' ruling without question.

It was only now, now that she knew just how close she had come to sharing the same fate, that she could see the terrible truth. She could finally sense the deepest coldness of her people, the mindset that allowed them to condemn an innocent child to death without the slightest hint of remorse.

The flame in her heart burned stronger, as though it were consuming her very soul. It ate away at the broken pieces of her identity until she was no more than a shell for the inferno within. Unfamiliar hot emotions swirled through her: Violent, searing anger at those who had done such terrible things; burning desire, for what, she hardly knew; a sweltering sense of oppression as the fire burned away her carefully constructed world. The mental flames threatened to overwhelm her, and, in desperation, she pulled the familiar cold around her.

Ice.

She knew ice, or so she thought. Now, though, the cold that poured through her was almost as unfamiliar as the heat. It chilled her to the marrow, and, this time, it hurt. Instead of the cool aloofness she expected, she was greeted by the icy emptiness of despair.

It should have been her.

She should have been the one to die. She was a terrible person who didn't deserve to live. She could end this, share her brother's fate as she should have so long ago.

No!

With a tremendous effort, Yukina reached out and grasped the fire while still clinging to the ice. She was shaking now, hands clenched in empty fists as she struggled to steady the emotional seesaw she'd been thrown onto.

Rage, despair-fury, depression-anger, dejection…slowly, far too slowly, her wildly swinging emotions evened out, leaving her limp and exhausted. Her eyes were damp as she blinked them open, and three round hiruseki stones lay shining in the snow by her knees. She had been crying without even realizing it.

She stared at the gems with a mix of shock, amazement, and a vague sense of shame. How could she…? What was…? This wasn't…wasn't…normal.

All over again, she had to accept that she wasn't normal. Normal ice maidens didn't cry over something like this. Even if they had something like this to cry over, which was already far from normal, they wouldn't. Ice maidens didn't cry for grief, or pain, or anger. They never cried unintentionally. Each ice maiden would deliberately shed a single tear when she bore a child, to give to her as her birthright. That was the only time.

True, sometimes a woman had twins. Her mother had shed two stones, and given one to her brother—she had heard that once, one of the many shameful things she'd heard spoken of in whispers when she wasn't supposed to be listening. But two stones at once was the most she had ever heard of.

And yet here in the snow lay three. She was still too young, she had no children! The stones gleamed at her accusingly, and she snatched them up in panic.

As her heart slowed, she realized she didn't have as much to fear as she had thought. True, she should hide these gems, and any other signs of her secret fire, but they had already suspected her, and hadn't thrown her to her death. The same cold logic that had condemned her brother had saved her: as long as they didn't know for sure, she was safe. Besides, she was almost old enough to be considered an adult. And then…

And then…what?

Yukina rose resolutely to her feet, setting that question aside for the moment. She tucked the gems into a compartment in her sleeve, hidden away until she could figure out what to do about them. Brushing the snow from her kimono, she glanced at the sun, and was startled to find that barely half an hour had passed. It had felt more like a lifetime.

And perhaps, in a way, it had been. She wasn't sure who (or even what) she was anymore, but she certainly didn't feel like the same person she'd been that morning.

Yukina took a deep breath, wrapping the familiar cold around herself—though not as deeply as before. Her inner flame was still bright, filling her with a warmth and brightness that that only seemed intensified by the gentle coolness of her ice. It wasn't easy for her to restrain them both enough to coexist, to keep fire safely hidden within ice, but she could do it. She could do it, and it was worth it. Her mother's ice shielded her father's fire from the coldness of the other koorime.

Never again would she try to deny it to herself. She was a collision of opposites, a walking contradiction…and that was okay. It was right. It was who she was.

Her mother would have understood, she was sure. After all, hadn't she fallen for a man of fire? But it was too late. Her mother was already gone, taken young by grief and regret.

Yukina blinked back another improper tear as she thought of all the things she wanted to ask her mother now. Why hadn't she asked? Why did she have to maintain her carefully cultivated disinterest until it was too late?

She leaned towards the cold again. There was no use regretting what was past. She needed to learn some things and make some important decisions.

With a sense of resolve, she turned and headed for home.

Yukina had questions, and she knew where to get the answers.

Author's note: This was going to be a two-shot, but now I'm going to call it a one-shot with a sequal in the works. Check out the prequel "Hina's Story: Kaeru" if you're interested. Sorry-this project had grown on me!