Warnings: I used Saki's manga backstory here. I think. Or at least some warped combination of the manga version and the anime version. Also warnings for extreme unnecessary cruelty to Hisoka and -- you guessed it -- another cliffhanger.
Chapter Seven
“Well, this is . . .” Words fail me. Totally fail me. At least before we had somewhere to walk. Now I’ve woken up to find myself in a room that’s maybe ten feet by ten feet, white walls, no windows, no furniture. The only thing here is a door on the far side of the room.
Muraki is leaning against the wall, looking at the door as if he’s afraid of what’s behind it. Which he very well might be. I mean, I am. Not that you’d ever catch me admitting it in front of him.
I stand up and stretch. “Might as well get it over with,” I say.
“I suppose so,” Muraki agrees. “Should we knock?”
“And chance them saying we can’t come in? I don’t think we dare. For all we know, this leads outside. Or something.”
“Or something,” Muraki echoes dryly. We both stand there. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Of course I am,” I snap, and push it open. There’s a narrow hallway, maybe three feet wide and five feet long. At the other end is another door. “This is stupid,” I decide after we spend more quality time staring at it, and push the other door open. We’re faced with a room just like the one we left, except there’s a plain black desk set up between us and the far door.
Sitting at it is . . . well . . . just an ordinary guy. He’s not a demon, as far as my empathy can tell, so I’m presuming he’s a damned soul. He steeples his hands and looks at us. “What can I do for you?” His voice is pleasant; I’d say he’s probably in his forties somewhere.
We blink at him. “Can we go through?” I ask. “Or can -- ” I’m struck with sudden inspiration. “Can you tell us how to get through the levels?”
“Sure, sure,” he says, waving his hands like a used car salesman. “Anything can be had for a price.”
“A . . . price?” More blinking on our part.
He smiles and nods. “What can you offer me in exchange for the information?”
“I don’t know,” I stammer. “What do you want?”
“Well, given that I’m stuck here for Eternity, there isn’t much,” he says mournfully. “It’s kind of a catch-22, this level. You can’t leave until you give us what we want, but there’s nothing that you can give us that we’d want. You know?”
“Why are you here?” Muraki asks him.
He shakes a finger at us. “That’s information. Information can only be had for a price.”
“Are you stuck here?” I ask skeptically. “Making deals for nothing?”
He nods. “It’s a dreary job,” he mutters. “But better than the first two levels. If you get all the way down to the fifth, sometimes they reward you. Reward you! Hah!”
“So you are a damned soul?” I manage, poking cautiously at his mind.
“What did you think I was, a general of the Makai?” he asks dryly.
I shrug. “How about . . .” I search desperately for anything we might be able to give him, and latch onto an idea. “Your happiness,” I blurt out. “I’m an empath. If you have any happy memories, I can pull them up and feed them back to you in a loop. You wouldn’t even have to realize you were here.”
His eyes widen fractionally. “You can do that?”
I nod. I’ve never done it before, but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work, and anyway, if the loop wears down, we’ll be long gone by then.
“Give me a little taste,” he says, smiling.
So I dig around in his mind and pull out the memory of his honeymoon. Sex is always a good thing to give to people, I’ve found. He smiles wistfully at the memory, reliving it in his own mind. “All right, I believe you,” he says. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you, and then you can lock me in and be going.”
“What are the five levels of Hell?”
“The five levels of death,” he replies. “Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Despair, Acceptance.”
I blink at him. It’s so quiet in here I can almost hear the sounds of my eyelids. But it makes sense. “How do you move between them?”
“It’s different for each level.”
“How do I get out of this one?”
“Make it down this hallway. There’s thirty rooms. If you can strike a bargain with each of us, you’re done.”
I frown at him. Something about that doesn’t seem quite right, but there’s not much I can say. “And then?”
“Then . . .” His lips twist in a smile. “Then, despair. I’ve said enough. Give me my happiness and be going.”
I nod, pull up enough memories to make a continuous loop, and lock him into it. It’ll hold for at least a few hours. I don’t know what will happen when we leave Hell. Then I waver with weariness, leaning against the table.
We leave the room and find ourselves in another narrow hallway with another door.
“Can you do that another twenty-nine times?” Muraki asks me, raising an eyebrow.
I raise an eyebrow right back. “Do I have a choice?”
~~~~
You know, there’s an old phrase about biting off more than you can chew, which I think fits this situation quite aptly. Because I definitely have. Specifically in trying to get through this third level, though I suppose you could apply the phrase to the fact that I came to Hell in the first place.
By the time we’re through the first five doors, I’m so exhausted that I can barely stand. Muraki suggests we take a break, so I slump to the ground in the little hallway.
“Do you think the first man was telling the truth?” he asks me. “That there are thirty rooms, and we have to go through all of them?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and it comes out as half a moan. “None of the other levels seem to have had tasks set up for the souls traveling through, but I don’t know how all this works. If I just knew that, I’d be all set, but . . .”
“Because I don’t think you can continue to do this,” he says, giving me a critical look.
“Thanks, Dr. Obvious,” I snap. I suppose it makes me angry because he’s right. I can’t keep doing this. By the time we get to the end, I’ll be so worn out that I won’t be any use to anyone -- and that’s if we stop for frequent breaks.
There’s a brief moment of silence.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I force myself to say. Apologizing to him makes my skin crawl with annoyance. “I know that I can’t keep doing this, but I don’t see any other way.”
He doesn’t say anything. So I don’t either. Which results in us getting absolutely nowhere. Way to go, us.
“Come on,” I say, hauling myself to my feet. “Let’s go.”
I stumble through the next two rooms, and when I get to the third and reach for the energy necessary, I just don’t have it. I’ve burned up all my reserves, and those will take time to replenish. So I do the smart thing and stare helplessly at the man whose happiness I’m supposed to be delivering.
Muraki reaches out and rests a hand on my shoulder. Even under normal circumstances, the touch would make me flinch, but now he uses it to transfer some of his energy to me.
I use that to complete the empathy, then walk out into the hallway with him on my heels. “How long can you keep that up?” I ask.
He shrugs. “We’ll have to see, now won’t we.”
~~~~
So tired. So, so tired. Can’t keep doing this anymore. Muraki and I collapse in the twenty-first hallway, both of us too exhausted to even keep walking. Should be sleeping, but can’t. Apparently the damned don’t get sleep. So we lie there with our eyes closed. It’s anyone’s guess what he’s thinking. Hell, it’s anyone’s guess what I’m thinking, too. I’m too tired to figure it out myself.
Have to keep going. Have to get to Tsuzuki. How long has it been? I’m not sure. Can’t keep track of how long because I keep passing out between levels. Probably at least a full day, though. Tsuzuki’s been gone a full day. I lasted five weeks without him last time. But this time? I don’t know what’s happening to him.
I thought our bond would kick back in when I got to Hell, but it hasn’t. It’s still cut off. I guess that must be because we’re not on the same level. When I find him again . . . oh please let me find him again . . .
Just think of him. Keep thinking of him and I won’t have to think about where I am or what’s happening. Think of his gentle touch and his amethyst eyes. Eyes that no human can have. Demon.
// “that boy is so scary, it’s like he can read my thoughts . . . he must be a demon . . . ” //
No. Tsuzuki is no more demon than I am. We are what life makes of us, and it made Tsuzuki into someone wonderful. He’s not a demon. I’ll find him and we’ll leave, and then . . . then . . .
Then what?
“Oi,” Muraki says. “Are you all right?”
I hadn’t even realized I was crying. I’m so tired that I can’t hold it back anymore. I bury my face in my arm to hide the tears.
// “And then?”
“Then . . . then, despair.” //
“Come on.” Muraki puts an arm underneath me and lifts me up to my feet. “We have to keep moving.”
How the hell is he managing this? His cause is no greater than mine, yet he seemed unfazed by all of this. Why?
But I think I understand. He holds no delusions of getting out and returning to the life he had. He knew this was a suicide mission from the beginning, and he doesn’t care. He wants to find Saki and kill him, and then he’ll be content to die. But I can’t make that sort of deal with myself.
Make a deal. Bargaining. If only I could figure out how this worked . . .
We push open the door.
The man sitting at the desk is in his mid-twenties, and he looks cold and cruel. Looking at him, I feel the ice cold of despair seeping into me again. Just from touching his mind, I know he won’t accept our deal. He has no happy memories. It won’t work.
“What can you offer me?” he asks quietly.
There’s no happiness there, just a strain of something more evil and perverted than Muraki himself. (And is that ever saying something.) He’s looking at me. He wants . . . he wants . . .
“Oh God no.” I shudder and sink to the floor, hugging myself as if to keep all the pieces from falling apart. Muraki gives me a questioning look, but I can’t bring myself to speak. Take a few deep breaths and try to calm myself, which fails miserably. “No . . . No, I can’t, I can’t . . .”
“Pull yourself together,” Muraki says sharply. “What can’t you do?”
Think of Tsuzuki.
Think only of Tsuzuki.
// “My life for your life.” //
I pull myself to my feet, wavering to one side and then catching myself as I start to fall.
// “My death for your life.” //
Muraki is still staring at me, uncertain as to what I’m doing. I’d tell him, but I don’t think I could bring myself to say it.
// “My life for your death.” //
This might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And still he watches me, his eyes devouring every detail of my presence. How many teenaged boys did he do this to? I don’t even want to contemplate. No wonder he’s in Hell.
// “My death for your death.” //
Think only of Tsuzuki.
“I offer you myself.”
~~~~
Room twenty-three.
Muraki is carrying me. I’d protest, but I don’t have the strength. I can’t walk, so there’s really not many other options anyway. To his credit, he says nothing about what happened in the last room. He went back out into the hallway to wait, and I told him when we could go.
Thinking of Tsuzuki.
“There’s nothing you can offer me,” the damned soul says, his voice dull. “Nothing, unless you can get me out of here.”
Which we can’t do. “I can give you your happiness,” I mumble into Muraki’s shoulder. I don’t think even he heard me, but maybe he did, because he repeats my words. Only using the word ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. How thoughtful of him. I guess it really is a team project now.
“No!” He stands up. “I know what you intend to do, and I won’t allow it. We don’t deserve happiness. That’s why we’re here. I won’t let you.”
Muraki stares at him. I’m too tired to even care.
“There’s nothing we can offer you?” Muraki finally asks.
“Nothing,” the man snaps. “Now get out.”
Muraki backs into the hallway and sets me down. “We seem to have a bit of a problem,” he tells me, as if I wasn’t listening. Actually, I suppose I can’t blame him for that. He probably doesn’t even know whether or not I’m conscious.
“I heard.” My voice is hoarse. From screaming or from tears. I don’t know which.
“What do you want to do?”
I pull my knees up to my chest and curl into a ball. Fetal position, the most protected position. Wishing that Tsuzuki was here to wrap himself around me and keep my safe. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll never get out of here.”
“That’s -- ”
Muraki stops.
And I feel myself sinking through the floor.
~~~~
Well, level four is just . . . dandy. It looks like a swamp. We’re sitting in about six inches of stagnant water. Everything is very dull and gray and wet. I’ve been here thirty seconds and I hate it. Passed out again, damn it. And my watch has stopped working. I guess it isn’t waterproof.
All around us, other damned souls are lying around in the muck, staring sightlessly at the sky. It’s more than a little creepy. Occasionally we hear one of them moan. Despair. It seeps into me from all around, and I have to slam up the strongest empathic shields I have to keep from going insane.
“I’ve got it!” I practically shriek.
Muraki looks at me. “Got what?”
“I know how it works!” I tell him excitedly. “Think back. Level one, anger.”
“It was a pretty angry level,” he says dryly.
“Not that, you blithering idiot,” I snap. It feels good to be up to insulting Muraki again. I still lack the strength to even walk, but my mouth is functioning again, and so is my brain. “What did I say just before we got to the second level?”
Muraki frowns, thinking. “You said ‘this isn’t happening,’” he says, and his eyes start to widen as he understands.
“Exactly. I started to deny, so we sank through to denial. Then we got to bargaining when I started to pray to some unknown figure and say that I would do whatever it took to get through this.”
Muraki rolls his eyes. “I wish you’d done that out loud. I might have figured it out sooner. So we got here because -- ”
“Because I gave up,” I say with a nod. “I decided it was hopeless. Why weren’t you doing any of the things to open up the gap between levels?”
He shrugs. “Maybe you just beat me to it each time.”
I give him a dirty look. “So all we have to do to get to the last level is . . . accept.”
He blinks at him. “Accept what?”
“I’m working on that.”
“Well, it’s not to accept that we’re in Hell,” he says slowly. “Because we both did that a long time ago.”
“But maybe you can’t sink directly from one to five,” I reply. “Because that seems to be the most obvious thing to have to accept.” I pause. “Okay . . . I’m in Hell. I accept it.”
Nothing happens.
“Right, so much for that.”
“Do you have your strength back?” Muraki asks. “I’d prefer to continue this conversation somewhere a bit more dry.”
I nod. “Enough to walk, anyway.” I stand up. The mud makes a disgusting sucking sound as I pull out of it, and it’s clinging to my clothes. Ew. “But I’m pretty sure that no matter where we go, it’s all going to look the same.”
“Most likely,” Muraki agrees. “But walking will keep us warm. Besides, I thought I saw a light in the distance.”
“By all means, lead the way,” I say, gesturing.
He gives me a withering look and we start to walk again, trudging through the muck. After a few minutes, we even come to a path of sorts. It’s not much, just a strip of mud that’s covered in less water than the rest of the ground.
“I really wish those people would stop moaning,” he says conversationally, as we continue to walk.
“No kidding.” I’m shivering uncontrollably from cold.
“Told you that you should have kept your jacket,” he remarks. I just glare at him. “If we could find a dry spot, we could try to light a fire.”
“Yeah, right,” I say, looking around. “Where’s that light you saw?”
“I’m not sure,” he admits.
I sigh. “Let’s sit down for a bit.”
We manage to find a place where two large boulders sit next to the path, and haul ourselves up onto them. It’s really not worth trying to start a fire. Even if we could find a dry spot, all the trees are soaked. We’d never be able to find enough dry wood.
“Ne, Muraki . . .”
“Hm?”
“Why did you come?” Call me a glutton for punishment, but I’m actually interested in talking to the man. I think the cold is going to my head. But at least it’ll give me something else to think about.
He raises an eyebrow at me. “To find Saki. I thought I’d made that clear.”
“Yes, but . . . why?” I huddle into a ball on the rock, resting my chin on my knees. It’s so cold here, I hate it. Cold goes right to my bones. I guess it must be because I’m so thin. “Do you hate him that much, even after death?”
Now why does that phrase sound familiar?
“Yes,” Muraki says, apparently not disturbed by this line of questioning.
Tsubaki-hime. She asked me that about Muraki. Do you hate him that much, even after death. Of course, I never figured out if she was referring to my death or his (since he had ‘died’ on that assignment, after all.) I did hate him that much. But I’m not sure I still do, which really annoys me.
I want to continue to hate him. Not so much for what he did to me, but for what he did to Tsuzuki.
// “I was taught that you should always forgive. That we could never judge people’s true motivations.” //
Akimiya told me that, about the man who had killed him and tried to rape his fiancee.
Is Muraki truly so desperate to be loved that he would take anything he could get, even by forcing Tsuzuki to be his?
Damn it, I don’t want to think like this! I was content to hate him! I never wanted to forgive him, or even think that there might be a reason to do so. Why am I thinking like this?
// “Because when I first met him . . . he wasn’t that much different from you.” //
I wanted to understand Muraki when we first met again. Wanted to know what had made him so evil, so perverted. Wanted to know what could have made someone like him. But it went so deep that I couldn’t find its roots, so I gave up. And sat back to hate him without even thinking twice about it.
Now I have the roots of his evil in front of me, and I can’t help but wonder . . . have I been wrong this entire time?
Muraki lights a cigarette.
“Why do you hate your brother?” I have to know. I don’t want to know, but I have to.
“He killed my father,” Muraki says absently, as if he’s not even really thinking about what we’re talking about. “He tore our entire family apart. And he tried to kill me as well. But then he died, at the hands of someone else.”
I remember the Queen Camilla, thinking that Muraki had died. I remember not knowing how to feel. I was happy that his evil was gone, yes, but at the same time I wished it had been me that had killed him.
“I kept part of him,” Muraki continues. “I studied cloning and genetics. I was going to create a body for him, so I could kill him myself.”
Okay, that’s . . . just about the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe the most fucked up, too.
Muraki shrugs slightly. “But it was destroyed when the lab in Kyoto got burned down by Touda.” He smiles crookedly. “I haven’t had much to do since then.”
“Is that why you started trying to kill me?” I ask dryly.
He still smiles. “Part of the reason, yes.”
I try to imagine that. Try to imagine having only one goal that I live for, and have it suddenly taken away. By the time I thought Muraki was dead, even for that brief time after Kyoto, I had Tsuzuki. I had something else to live for. What would it be like to have no purpose, no reason to exist?
“You have no intention of getting out of this alive, do you?” I ask him softly.
He shrugs. “What are the odds?”
“Not good,” I admit. “But they won’t get any better by not acknowledging a chance.”
“Well, as you said,” Muraki says with a twisted smile, “I’m going to wind up here anyway. So what does it matter if I die here? Nobody would care, least of all you.”
Silence falls, and I shiver.
“Oriya would,” I say softly.
Muraki gives me a sharp look, but he doesn’t reply.
Acceptance. What do we have to accept? Each other? This world? The hopelessness of the entire situation?
“Oriya knows I’m not coming back,” Muraki says, his voice very quiet.
There’s nothing I can say, because I know he’s right.
“Well, well, well,” a new voice says, as if our thinking about him has summoned him up. Which, given our location, is totally possible. He has a passing resemblance to Muraki, though his hair is dark where Muraki’s is silver. “What have we here?”
“Saki . . .” Muraki breathes the word out so softly that I barely hear him, like a valediction.
“Of all the places to meet you again,” Saki says with a smirk, “actually, I did expect it to be here. You’re paying for your crimes at least, Kazutaka?”
Muraki stands up. “Actually, I came to kill you.”
Saki laughs. “Got some news for you. I’m already dead.”
“I know,” Muraki says. “Which is why my plan is to dissolve your soul as if you never existed.”
Can he do that?
Saki laughs mockingly. “You’ll have to catch me first,” he says, and weaves off through the swamp at a surprising speed to vanish in the distance.
“Saki!” Muraki stumbles after him. “SAKI!”
And with that, he tears a hole into the very fabric of reality, and follows his brother somewhere that I can’t go.
I stare after him.
Alone.
You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
Acceptance. But there’s nothing to accept.
And that’s when it hits me. There’s no way to the fifth level. It’s probably a place that only other demons can go. It isn’t open to souls of the damned. Or even souls of the Shinigami, trying desperately to find someone trapped.
There’s no way out.
I try to run after Muraki but fall, land facedown in the mud. It feels like I’m falling forever.
And then, with a sharp thud, I land on a stone cold marble floor at Tsuzuki’s feet.
~~~~
Chapter Eight
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