A/N: Warnings for some Supernatural!exposition since many of you seemed to have not read it. Don't worry, it's not that much. Also, for those of you who do know Supernatural, warnings for OOC!Sam, who served as a vehicle for the exposition and thus told Hisoka way more than he probably really would have. This is what crack is for.
Chapter Two
Despite Tsuzuki’s enthusiastic efforts to help, Hisoka plucked the pile of papers out of his ineffectual hands and started looking through them himself. Tsuzuki gave him a wounded look, and Sam and Dean decided they didn’t want to question Hisoka’s sudden involvement.
He answered their unspoken question anyway. “You don’t want him trying to help with paperwork,” he said. “It’s just a bad idea.”
“Is he going to spill coffee on it?” Sam asked, and sighed. “Seriously, we can’t make heads or tails of this case.”
“You didn’t exactly pick an easy one,” Hisoka said, now absorbed in filing away the information. “Thirty missing people in New York City? That’s worse than working a case in Tokyo. It’s no wonder that the police haven’t noticed. I’m surprised you even found the pattern at all.”
“Well, this is our job,” Dean said, not sure if he was irritated by Hisoka’s sudden professionalism, or the fact that he actually seemed vaguely impressed.
Hisoka put the folder down and said, “Actually, that’s something I have to ask. How did you put the pattern together? How did you wind up here?”
“I was just sweeping through all the missing person reports,” Sam said. “Looking for patterns. Insomnia, you know. This caught my eye. Maybe I actually learned something from my dad.”
“Yeah, Dad put together some of the craziest shit,” Dean said, sounding proud of this fact.
“Uh huh,” Hisoka said, deep in thought and clearly not showing the proper respect to John Winchester.
“Admittedly, some of these people may not be part of it,” Sam said. “There are breaks in the pattern. Age, timing – but it doesn’t mean they’re not involved. Of course, it doesn’t mean that they are involved, either.”
Hisoka glanced at Tsuzuki. “Well, there must be some similarity, something that connects them all.”
Tsuzuki looked over at the wall of missing persons articles that Sam and Dean had put up. “If that demon was involved,” he said, “what’s special about all these people?”
Sam and Dean both blinked. “The two halves of that sentence have nothing to do with each other,” Dean pointed out.
“Uh.” Tsuzuki blinked. “You’re right.”
Hisoka let out a snort. “I think your train of logic left without waiting for the mortals to board. I knew what you meant.”
“Okay, then what, boy genius?” Dean asked, bristling.
Hisoka didn’t react to his tone. “If a demon is kidnapping people, there would have to be something special that he would want the person for. Demons generally only want people for one thing – consuming psychic energy.”
“Or possessions,” Sam said.
“Which actually comes to the same thing, in the end,” Hisoka said. “If a demon possesses a person long enough, eventually it consumes all their energy and has to look for a new host. They’re like parasites that way.”
Sam blinked. “Wow,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hisoka said.
“That would explain the breaks in the pattern,” Tsuzuki said.
Again, Sam and Dean blinked at him. “Whoa, wait,” Dean said.
Hisoka laughed outright this time. “He’s been doing this for seventy years. You’ll learn to keep up eventually.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “Wait. What?”
“Never mind,” Hisoka said. “You were saying, Tsuzuki?”
“It would explain the teenagers. It’ll go for people with Reikan ability.”
This time, even Hisoka blinked. “Okay, there you lost even me,” he said.
Tsuzuki sighed, clearly it was a burden to work with people who were so slow on the uptake. “Reikan usually comes out when people are teenagers. It makes them vulnerable. So, snag someone before their power really starts to show itself, before they can defend themselves. But it wouldn’t always need a teenager; it could sometimes take someone older if their Reikan was latent. Or maybe they just had something too good to pass up, and the demon is willing to take the risk. It wouldn’t want to bother with young children, even though Reikan sometimes presents itself there, because no demon wants to possess a five year old.”
Hisoka paused. “Actually – well, no, never mind. That was sort of a special case.”
“Okay, broadly,” Tsuzuki said.
“Do I want to know?” Sam asked, and Hisoka shook his head.
Dean was staring at Tsuzuki as if he were an alien. “Dude, you’re actually not an idiot? Why do you act like an idiot?”
“’Cause it’s fun,” Tsuzuki said. “Who wants to spend their entire life being all serious Mr. Business?”
“Aren’t you dead?” Dean asked.
“Yeah, I’m still getting over living.”
“Anyway, better question,” Dean said, changing the subject before he could start to think about that statement, “what the hell is Reikan?”
“Uh . . .” Hisoka frowned.
“It’s, well . . .” Tsuzuki blinked at Hisoka.
“I don’t know it in English,” Hisoka confessed.
“Can you approximate?” Sam asked.
“It’s sort of like . . .” Hisoka made several strangled noises. “Well, me. Or you.” He pointed at Sam.
Sam gave him a confused look. “Uh, what club did you sign me up for without my permission?”
“It’s not a club,” Hisoka said, rolling his eyes. “It’s . . . well, never mind. I’ll look it up and find a translation for you; I can explain it later. The point is that it’s probably the factor that links all these people together, if that demon was involved. Which is, frankly, a pretty big if. You two went there just because it was haunted; we have no evidence that it’s actually involved in this case.”
Sam leaned back in his chair and let his head thud against the wall.
“We should find out more about the demon,” Tsuzuki suggested. “That way we’d have a better chance of gauging whether or not it was involved.”
“Good idea,” Hisoka said. “But I don’t know exactly how to go about accomplishing it here.”
“Hey,” Dean said, “we’re professionals. Just leave it to us.”
~ ~ ~ ~
Hisoka ducked around a pile of books and found Sam in a study carrel, surrounded by piles of a similar size and nature. He glanced around at the piles, glad that he had left Tsuzuki behind; the older Shinigami probably would have gotten a headache just from seeing all those books. “You look like you’re having fun,” he greeted the other man.
“Uh . . . sort of.” Sam surveyed his stacks in some despair. Books about cults and demons, some fiction and some nonfiction, were mixed in with newspapers and a boxes of microfilm, his dad’s journal, and his laptop.
“Sure looks like it.” With a sigh, Hisoka pulled a chair over and picked up the book on top of one of the stacks. Despite his griping, he found the reading interesting. He had always liked reading, and some of the American perspectives on the supernatural were fascinating.
“That one’s interesting,” Sam said, glancing at the book Hisoka had chosen. He wasn’t sure why Hisoka had joined him in the library, and was waiting for the Shinigami to say something useful. “About half of it’s true, as far as I can tell.”
Hisoka looked at the table of contents, frowned, and shook his head. “Maybe America has different demons.”
“America has some of everything,” Sam agreed. “From all over the world. Every culture brought at least one boogey man with it, as far as I’ve seen. Do you have demons like the ones in there?”
“Er . . . I don’t think so.” Hisoka was still frowning at the picture, which happened to be an incubus over the bed of a (mostly naked) sleeping woman. He wondered where Sam had gotten the book, and why. “Our demons are more subtle, I guess.”
“Subtle?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Hisoka said. “I mean, more possessing and shadow government and less . . . destroying of buildings and kidnapping of children.”
“Here I guess it depends on the demon,” Sam said thoughtfully. He had never given much thought to the motivations of demons. “I mean, I’ve dealt with a demon whose single purpose seemed to be killing lots of people by plane crashes, of all things. And I’ve dealt with demons that are willing to spend more than twenty years setting up its grand plan.”
“I guess demons in Japan just have more structure,” Hisoka said, idly flipping a page without really reading what was on it. “Which makes sense, culturally.”
“Structure isn’t something America is good at,” Sam agreed. “How do you like it?”
“How do I like America?” Hisoka asked, a little startled that Sam was asking a friendly question. Sam nodded, copying something from one of the newspapers onto the notes he was taking. “It’s all right for a vacation, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Being Japanese has instilled a deep love of structure and order in me. I think the perpetual chaos here would drive me insane.”
“It’s not all chaos,” Sam said, sounding almost philosophical. “It looks like it, but if you stay in one place, a structure will show.” He shrugged. “You just have to find the patterns. But I think I’d find all of your structure . . . heavy. Plus I’d have to duck to get through every doorway.”
Hisoka let out a snort. “Yes, poor Tsuzuki isn’t used to being so short.”
“He’s an interesting guy,” Sam said.
“Thanks, that’s very polite of you.”
“That’s my job,” Sam said. “To be the polite one.”
“In that case, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Sam said, folding up the newspaper and opening a new one. “I don’t promise to answer, though.”
Hisoka nodded, accepting this wordlessly. He pondered how to phrase his question, then finally decided to be blunt. “Every time you see Tsuzuki and I, you vibrate with the tension. You’re very good at not showing it, but something about us has you very nervous, and I’ll admit to being curious about why.”
Sam couldn’t help but tense, his shoulders tightening slightly. He wasn’t about to discuss what had happened with Dean if at all possible, but he also wanted any information on reapers that he could manage to get. He had a feeling, however, that the sharp-eyed teenager sitting next to him would know damned well that he was being pumped for information, and not appreciate it. He wondered if he could get away with a semi-truth. “No mortal likes to be reminded of their mortality. And honestly, reapers are one of the largest supernatural mysteries there are. Dean and I, we’re used to being well informed.”
“So if I answered your questions about reapers, would you stop radiating anxiety at me?” Hisoka asked. “Because I’ve got to tell you, it’s really distracting.”
Sam frowned at the way that Hisoka had phrased that statement. “I radiate anxiety? You mean, more than most people?” He found himself suddenly worried that he might be some sort of beacon because of whatever psychic abilities he had. “Can you always tell what people are feeling?”
“Yeah,” Hisoka said, his tone matter-of-fact. “I’m an empath. It’s not you. Actually, I feel less from you than I do from most people.”
“Huh,” Sam said, wondering how much Hisoka had already figured out from the two of them, and suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. “Why is that?”
“Because you’re psychic, or so I would assume,” Hisoka said. “You’re in terribly bad control of it, though.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Sam couldn’t argue that, so he decided to change the topic slightly. “So are all psychics immune to being read?” He thought of the incident with Andy, and added, “Or directed?”
“Yeah,” Hisoka said with a nod. “They create a natural sort of static around them. Unless they’re trying to project, but I’ve never been very good at that myself.”
“Could I just save us both some time and ask you to explain to me what you know about the topic?” Sam asked, wondering how much he would be able to trust the information. The two Shinigami didn’t seem to be out to get them, but Sam was not feeling particularly trusting at the moment.
Hisoka opened his mouth, then closed it, frowning slightly. “Well, I can try,” he said, but he sounded dubious. “But a lot of the words . . . I don’t know them in English.”
“I have a Japanese-English dictionary,” Sam offered, knowing that this was sort of pathetic.
“I really doubt it’ll have all the words I need. Like ‘reikan’.”
“Can you explain the words with other words?” Sam asked, wondering if Hisoka was going to get irritated with him. He knew that he was asking for a lot, and so far they had promised nothing in return.
Hisoka made a slight face. “Reikan . . . well, the closest English word is probably psychic. But it’s also spiritual in a way. The more spiritual force you have, the more reiatsu you have. But reikan ability is what lets you hear thoughts or feelings from other people. Does that make sense?”
Sam wasn’t sure. “Reiatsu – ” He paused to wince at his own pronunciation, nothing like Hisoka’s – “is the power, but reikan is the ability to do something with it?”
“Er . . . something to that effect, yeah,” Hisoka agreed. “Close enough for the purposes of the conversation. Anyway, people with high reiatsu give off strong thoughts and feelings, but if they have reiatsu and reikan, then everything will be fuzzy, staticky. You follow?”
Sam nodded, frowning as he ordered all this in his head. “How well can you read Dean?”
“Dean’s an open book,” Hisoka told him.
“Huh,” Sam said, knowing that his brother wouldn’t like that.
“I don’t try to read people,” Hisoka said, his voice slightly defensive. “In fact, I do my best not to. But it’s something I was born with, and not something I can change.”
“Dean’s a loud person,” Sam said, wondering if it was even remotely possible to explain his brother. He hadn’t meant to put Hisoka on edge, but at the same time felt it necessary to defend Dean. “But he’s also incredibly private at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“As much as people ever do,” Hisoka said. “People can’t help how loud they think. At least, not without years of training. Don’t worry. I know how to keep secrets. Comes with the territory.”
“Which territory?” Sam asked. “Being a reaper or being an empath?”
“Being an empath. Having people’s thoughts and feelings shoved in my face all the time. I learned pretty quickly to not share.”
“It must have been hard to manage as a kid,” Sam said.
Hisoka shrugged, clearly not anxious to have a conversation on that topic. “I didn’t learn how to use it until after I was dead, anyway.”
Sam wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse, but he was suddenly feeling as thought he might have gotten off light, as far as psychic powers went. “It’s a pretty intrusive gift, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I guess.” Hisoka cleared his throat. “Any other questions?”
Sam laughed, mostly to himself. “About a million, one of which being why I’m trusting you with any of this. I could write books on monsters and things that go bump in the night, but I know nothing about what’s going on in my own head without my permission.”
“What ability do you have?” Hisoka asked, his tone businesslike.
“Visions, dreams.” Sam found it was more difficult to admit out loud than he would have thought. “And maybe something else; it’s hard to tell.”
“How do you mean?” Hisoka asked.
There was a long moment of silence before Sam spoke again, weighing his unwillingness to trust someone who wasn’t Dean against a fairly desperate need to talk to someone about all of this, preferably someone who would understand and might know how to help. “I . . . once I moved something, a desk, with my mind. Telekinesis. But it was just once.” Sam wanted that gift even less than the visions; he kept thinking of Max. “And the visions are a reoccurring problem.”
“Precognition is pretty rare. How often do you have them?”
Sam counted back. “Four times. More than four visions, but only four times.”
“It’s probably just starting to come on, then. Which is odd. For most people, if it isn’t present from birth, it kicks in around puberty.”
“There are a lot of things that are odd about it. It’s all been in the last year and I’m not the only one. I just wish I could stop them,” he added, although he knew that this wasn’t really true. He had been able to save people with those visions, and that had stuck with him more than the pain they caused.
“No, you don’t,” Hisoka said dismissively. “You wish you could control them.”
“It might be nice,” Sam agreed. “I’m not a fan of blinding pain.”
“I don’t know a lot about precognition,” Hisoka admitted. “It’s very different from empathy. So I’d have to ask some people I know some questions before I could be much help.”
Somehow, this made Sam feel better. He would have been suspicious if Hisoka had just had all the answers he needed. “Thanks. Do you know . . . do visions usually revolve around one person or topic?”
“Hm . . . yes and no.” Hisoka frowned, wondering how to explain it. “Visions about something close to you or important to you would be stronger, so if your ability is still young, or if you’re suppressing it, then you might only have visions about one thing.”
“Because they’ve all been about the . . . this one person,” Sam said, stopping himself at the last minute before he could say anything about the demon. “And almost always about a psychic. Except my first one,” he said, mentally skipping past it before he could think about it too hard, “and then one about our old house. That was just about – ” He stopped suddenly, realizing that there had been a break in the pattern. They had assumed that the vision he had had about Lawrence was connected to the demon, but in the end, it hadn’t been. He had no idea what that might mean, but it was still interesting. “Huh.”
“Should I just nod and smile and pretend that any of that makes sense?” Hisoka asked.
“I thought they were all about this demon, a demon, not the one we’re dealing with now, but they’re not.” Sam was pleased with himself, and didn’t seem to realize that he was babbling.
“Okay,” Hisoka said, his voice neutral. “If you say so.”
“It would be nice to have more control over them.”
“You lost me about forty-five seconds ago, so maybe we should just talk about something else, since you’re clearly not willing to share the details with me.”
“I need to talk to Dean about the visions before I share with anyone else,” Sam decided. “So, sure, a new topic. We’ve got cults, demons, missing persons, and the New York Times.”
“And you, still worrying your head off about Shinigami.”
“Yeah, that too,” Sam said, and Hisoka let out a sigh. “Sorry, I’m just worried about digging the grave deeper instead of finding a way out.”
“Which is fine,” Hisoka said, looking decidedly noncommittal on the topic. “But understand that whatever’s wrong, I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.”
Sam tapped his pen against the table and twirled it in his fingers, a long ingrained habit when he was deep in thought. Then he abruptly said, “Why do you care about helping me at all? I mean, not to be rude, because that’s Dean’s job, but I got the impression that you were only helping us at all to keep your boyfriend happy.”
“Husband, actually,” Hisoka said, not seeming perturbed in the slightest at this accusation.
This caught Sam momentarily off guard. He blinked, his gaze automatically going to Hisoka’s ringless hands. “Is that legal in Japan, or do you just not care?” he asked curiously.
“Reapers aren’t really bound to the laws of the country they’re working in,” Hisoka said, amused. Following Sam’s gaze, he added, “And as to the ring, I don’t wear mine in public. I don’t look old enough to be married, so it draws attention, makes people remember me later.”
“Huh,” Sam said, feeling a little uncomfortable, given that Hisoka hadn’t yet answered the question he had asked. “Were you actually reading my thoughts there, or just using logic?”
“A little of both. And I’ll answer your question, don’t get your shorts in a knot.”
Sam ignored the second statement, vaguely insulted. “Why can’t you just read me to find out what’s bothering me? Is it that you can’t or that you won’t?”
“I know what’s bothering you,” Hisoka snapped impatiently. “That we’re reapers, and we might be after your brother. I can’t help but know that; that makes it through the static loud and clear. What I don’t know is why you’re afraid of that. And I’m a little invested in knowing that and getting you over it, because let me tell you, it is not fun as an empath to be around somebody who’s vibrating with nerves all the time. You know that feeling you get when a really annoying noise – like a car alarm or something – finally stops, and there’s huge relief because you hadn’t even realized the headache it was giving you? That’s what you’re doing to me, Sam. You’re the world’s loudest car alarm right in my ear, and since this case seems pretty complicated and we might be around for a while, I’d really prefer to get you to stop being so nervous, so I don’t have to poke my eyes out with a sharp stick or something.”
Sam couldn’t help but laugh; Hisoka’s honest tirade eased his nerves more than any reassurances could have. “A sharp stick? That’s sort of gross.” He shook his head slightly. It was difficult, because he needed to know that Dean was safe, but he was afraid to share the information, lest he draw the reapers’ attention to them. “I remember when my life was much simpler.”
“Here’s to that,” Hisoka said, and sighed. “Look. Sam. Seriously, even if there are Reapers after you or your brother, it has nothing to do with me or Tsuzuki. We have no jurisdiction here.”
“Do I have your word that you won’t be reporting anything to people,” Sam asked, frowning suddenly; he had never thought of reapers as ‘people’ before. “People that do have jurisdiction here?”
“You have it. Honestly, I wouldn’t even know where to report you, and don’t care very much.” Hisoka pauses, thinking things over. “Let me try to explain it to you so you’ll trust me a little. Tsuzuki and I . . . it’s our job to get people who’ve cheated death. It’s not fun. In fact, it’s something we both hate to do. Because these people haven’t done anything wrong most of the time; they’ve just been lucky. If Dean’s managed to cheat death and it’s not my responsibility to be the one to send him on, that’s just fine with me.”
Sam threw in the towel, not sure what other choices he had. “It’s . . . reapers have come for him twice. Three strikes, you know? I’m really anxious to avoid that third time.”
“If he’s escaped twice, I might have to be impressed with him,” Hisoka said.
“He is impressive,” Sam said, with a half smile. “Always has been.”
“If you say so,” Hisoka said politely.
Sam sighed. “So there was this thing, this monster. These things started out in Ireland, but that’s not really the point. They steal children. We had tracked this one down to its lair, and two of the kids were still alive. Anyway, the best way to kill these things is by electrocution. We had taser guns; Dean hit it but he was standing in a puddle of water. Maybe he was startled, or not paying attention. Hell, maybe he had forgotten his eighth grade science class. Upshot is that he electrocuted himself as well. Messed his heart up pretty badly.”
“Okay,” Hisoka said, waiting for the rest of it. It was clearly costing Sam a lot of effort to talk about.
“He had maybe a month to live, if he was really careful, stayed in the hospital, let them take care of him,” Sam said, with a shudder at the memories. “That’s not Dean’s way of doing things, so he had maybe half that time. I sort of flipped. Eventually I tracked down a faith healer. Amazingly, the guy was the real deal. Full miracles.”
“No such thing,” Hisoka said softly, “but go on.”
“They are if you don’t look too close,” Sam said. “But that was the trouble. We’re used to looking really close at things. Every time this man healed someone, someone else paid for it. We didn’t notice until after Dean was better.”
Hisoka wisely withheld his thoughts about how they had perhaps not looked until after Dean had been healed. “So how was the guy doing it?”
“It was his wife. He didn’t know any better. He honestly just thought he was helping people. I don’t know where she learned the magic – it was pretty heavy duty – but she had bound a reaper. She’d pick who would be saved and who would die, and the reaper would just transfer the damage.”
“Bound a – ” Hisoka’s jaw sagged a little; although he had heard of demons possessing reapers, he hadn’t heard of humans controlling them.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “Guess people are capable of some pretty impressive stuff when they’re desperate.”
“I guess so, but that’s some scary magic. How’d it all turn out?”
“As soon as she knew we were on to her, she sent it after Dean. He kept it busy while I set it free. Then it turned on her.”
“And killed her?” Hisoka asked, although he knew that it would have. Sam confirmed this with a nod. “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that particular incident. The reaper was bound to do everything it did, so Dean wouldn’t be held responsible for it. I don’t see any reason why they’d come after him.”
“Yeah.” Sam let out a breath. “I wasn’t quite so worried about that one.”
“How long ago was that, anyway?”
“Six or eight months ago.”
“If they were going to come for him for that, then they would have already,” Hisoka said, and felt his own shoulders relax as some – although not very much – of the tension drained from Sam. “So, the second time?”
“The second time . . . uh . . .” Sam took a deep breath, one hand going to rub at the back of his neck. “I . . . I don’t know even half of what happened. I have some guesses, but none of them make me feel any better.”
Hisoka sat and listened while Sam gave a brief account of the events that had occurred after the car accident, his hands clasped in his lap to hide their shaking. Even though Sam was somewhat staticky, the emotional pain he felt over the events came through loud and clear. He glossed over as much as he could regarding the demon, not wanting to give away too many secrets, while Hisoka listened.
“So I guess Dad cut a deal,” Sam finished up, “but I don’t think it was with the reaper.”
“Yeah,” Hisoka agreed. “A reaper would never make a deal like that. Every once in a while there are rogue reapers, but . . . this sounds like it was something different.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Sam said. “Dean doesn’t remember anything before he actually woke up. But I know a reaper could care less about having that gun. Which means, as far as I can figure, that the reaper got the short end of the stick.”
Hisoka nodded and said soberly, “Reapers can be possessed by demons and their own powers used against them. I’ve seen it happen.”
“The demon in question is powerful,” Sam said. “And I don’t think he’s the type to be making deals with reapers. So I’m just worried that they might come to collect.”
“If the reapers investigate, they’d be far more interested in the demon than in whoever the demon was involved with,” Hisoka said. “But it’s possible that they would figure out that Dean was supposed to be dead; I won’t say that it’s not.”
“Do you know or are willing to share any ideas on how to keep them away from Dean?” Sam asked hopefully.
“Well, the first thing to do would be to try to see if they’re investigating at all,” Hisoka said matter-of-factly. “If the reaper went missing, they probably are. But, if the demon released the reaper and just wiped their memory of the encounter, then they might have reported back as if nothing happened, in which case Dean would just go onto a very long list of spirits that didn’t check in properly. The Shinigami even in Japan don’t have time to investigate every single case, and I sincerely doubt that America’s bureau is even half as good as Japan’s. So that would be equivalent to Dean’s case going into a dead-letter box. If I’m using the English correctly.”
“I like that last option,” Sam said, trying to loosen up.
Hisoka held up a hand in warning. “I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just saying that it’s possible.”
Sam looked at him for a long minute, and then leaned his head down on his crossed arms. “Shit,” he muttered.
“If the reaper didn’t return, and they investigate the reaper’s disappearance, eventually it would lead them back to Dean,” Hisoka said. “However, it’s pretty obvious that Dean himself wouldn’t be responsible for it. They’d want the demon, and they’d probably leave Dean be for a while because he’s a clear link to the demon, one for them to follow.”
“Are reapers any better at hunting demons than us mortals?” Sam asked.
“Depends on the reaper. Tsuzuki, yes. Me, no.”
“Are reapers like him common?”
“No,” Hisoka said. “He’s got an enormous amount of power. No one’s really sure what Tsuzuki is, to be honest. But there are other reapers who can easily deal with demons.”
Sam rested his head on the desk, feeling exhausted. “I don’t want them looking for Dean or the Demon. Dad paid for Dean’s life. And the Demon certainly won’t be afraid of any reapers.”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that,” Hisoka said quietly. “One life is not equal to another. You can’t pay for someone else’s life with your own – not by the standards of the Shinigami, at least.”
“No one explained that to Dad,” Sam said, sounding a little heated, “so the rules will just have to change this once. He’s going to kick my ass for telling you any of this. Dean is, anyway.” He gave a sick-sounding laugh. “I guess I’m a little beyond Dad’s reach right now.”
“Dean doesn’t have to know I know,” Hisoka pointed out.
“There’s no way I could hide this from him,” Sam said, with another laugh, this one more genuine. “I never could lie to him.”
Hisoka thought about what he had seen and felt from Dean so far, and the fact that the older Winchester didn’t seem anywhere near as nervous about reapers as Sam did. “He doesn’t seem to know about this whole reaper-hospital-ouija board incident, does he.”
“He knows what I know,” Sam said. “And he knows that you make me nervous as hell. I’m not afraid of much.”
“Suit yourself,” Hisoka said with a shrug. “But I think if the reapers haven’t come for him by now, they probably won’t. How long ago was this?”
“A couple of months.”
“Well, the American Shinigami don’t seem to be quick, but still, that’s a long time for them to have not noticed. Do you want me to look into it?”
“I’d appreciate it, as long as it won’t alert anyone to us.”
“I think I can manage it discreetly,” Hisoka said, wondering when he would have time for this in amongst all the other work he was apparently going to be doing on his vacation. “Just a little inter-bureau cooperation, looking for a soul we think might have crossed into their territory. I’d have to be careful, but I don’t think it would be difficult.”
“Thank you,” Sam said. “I just . . . I can’t lose Dean. I won’t lose Dean.” He managed a half smile. “Sorry. I’m having emotional fits all over you.”
“It’s all right. Compared to Tsuzuki, you’re positively stoic.”
“Just never tell Dean that he’s an open book to you,” Sam said. “He wouldn’t take it well.”
“Don’t worry,” Hisoka said, amused that Sam felt the need to tell him this. “I’ve been empathic long enough to know things like that.”
“Yeah, well . . . thanks for being my therapist.”
“I think I’d have to be a good deal nicer before I’d qualify for that,” Hisoka said with a snort. “But thank you, for trusting me. I think it’ll make things easier. By the way, is this what Dean keeps thinking of as a ‘chick flick’ moment?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Sam said. “This was like a movie marathon.”
“Okay, uh . . . what is a chick flick? Because it sounds . . . dirty, somehow.”
Sam was somehow amused that Hisoka didn’t know the slang. “I guess it’s an American phrase. A chick flick is a movie based more on emotions than explosions. I’m trying to think of an example that might have made it over to Japan.”
“A girly movie,” Hisoka surmised.
“Yeah.”
“We have those in Japan, too. Tsuzuki likes them. Not that he would ever admit it.” He glanced at the piles of paperwork and let out a sigh. “I suppose we should be doing some actual work on the case, hm.”
Sam’s sigh echoed Hisoka’s as he glared at the drifts of paper. “We should at least try, because so far I’m pretty damned stumped.”
~ ~ ~ ~
Dean grumbled as he picked his way through the ruins of the hotel, wondering how he had gotten stuck with this assignment. Under normal circumstances, it was what he would have chosen: Sam was stuck in the library with his books and he was out in the field, checking out the haunted hotel.
It was difficult to be grateful for the assignment with Tsuzuki on his heels, enthusiastically poking his head everywhere and exclaiming about everything that might be considered even vaguely American.
“Shouldn’t this place have been demolished?” he muttered to himself. “This is New York; don’t they need the space?” He turned to Tsuzuki to catch the Shinigami peering excitedly down a dumbwaiter. “Don’t you have buildings in Japan?”
“Of course,” Tsuzuki said, with apparently no idea that Dean was irritated with him. “I haven’t seen one of these in decades,” he added. “I always thought it was sad when they stopped using them. They were so much fun to play in.”
Dean paused. “What, you were around then?” he asked, recalling Hisoka’s comment about seventy years.
Tsuzuki nodded. “Yeah. I’m over a hundred years old. Roughly.”
“So . . . you died seventy years ago?” Dean asked, finding this extremely odd.
“Almost eighty. I died when I was twenty-six, so, about your age. But that was a long time ago.” Tsuzuki stuck his head behind a curtain and sneezed violently.
Dean rolled his eyes.
“So,” Tsuzuki said cheerfully, “why are two mortals hunting demons? It baffles me. Is it an American thing?”
“Uh, not really,” Dean said, and didn’t elaborate.
Tsuzuki sighed. He had learned from long experience with Hisoka that when someone blatantly ignored the question he had asked, that it meant he shouldn’t ask again. “Oh, fine,” he said. “I can take a hint.”
“Taking a hint would have been not saying anything about it, and changing the subject,” Dean pointed out. They had entered the banquet room; the windows were boarded up, so even in the daylight, the room was mostly dark.
“I said that I could take a hint, not that I could take it well,” Tsuzuki said.
Dean rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how that ten year old brat of a partner puts up with you,” he said.
“You know, he’s your age,” Tsuzuki said.
“Yeah, whatever.” Dean moved aside the wreckage that they had used to cover up the hole he had kicked in the wall, which they had put there so no curious teenagers would find the passage. It was a precaution that Sam had insisted on; Dean hadn’t particularly cared.
“I wonder if there’s any other secret passages,” Tsuzuki said. “Can you get blueprints in America?”
Dean stared at him. “Dude, this isn’t the dark ages. Of course you can get blueprints.”
“Well, how would I know?” Tsuzuki asked defensively. “We have research people. If we need blueprints, someone gets them for us.”
“All we need to find is the demon’s lair,” Dean said, holding the EMF detector in one hand as he started down the tunnel. “And we will.”
“So, what’s with the beeping thing?” Tsuzuki asked, trying to peer at it.
Dean scowled and pulled it away. “It’s an EMF detector. Picks up on electronic vibrations, and – hey! Get away from it,” he said, as it wailed in protest as Tsuzuki peered at it. “You’re gonna short it out. Jesus. I can’t believe I’m having this problem.”
“Sorry!” Tsuzuki backed away and the machine went back to its normal noises. “Doesn’t it throw a fit at Sam? Why don’t you use Sam to find this stuff? Why do you use a machine?”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Dean grunted, paying far too much attention to the walls of the passage.
“Sam ought to be able to sense stuff,” Tsuzuki said, looking at him in innocent confusion. “I mean, at least some of the time. I was just wondering if living people can set off the meter too, or just us?”
“Monsters set off the meter, okay?” Dean asked. “And Sam isn’t one, so shut the hell up.”
“Neither am I,” Tsuzuki said, blinking at him.
“You’re a Reaper,” Dean said.
“Yeah, but you said monsters, not Reapers,” Tsuzuki said. “Not people.”
“Well, understand that before this morning, Reapers were never people,” Dean said. “And I’m still not sure you are. I don’t know why Sam’s decided he likes you two, but I don’t. So just shut up and let me do my job.”
Tsuzuki blinked. “You really don’t like it that your brother is psychic.”
Dean turned on him and waved the gun in his direction. “You don’t know anything about my brother, and you don’t know anything about me,” he said. “I don’t want your help. So, shut up. Let me do my job. Or go home. Either’s fine with me; in fact, I’d prefer the latter.”
An afterlife full of people like Tatsumi and Hisoka had given Tsuzuki infinite patience for dealing with cranky people. “I’m not stopping you from doing your job,” he said. “Just wondering why your brother’s gift upsets you so much.”
Dean stopped. “Because it’s not a gift. Okay? Now leave it the fuck alone.”
Tsuzuki paused. “Gift wasn’t the right word.”
“Oh, sure, blame it on translation.”
“I only learned English last night,” Tsuzuki said, edging towards a wibble. “I only meant it’s a talent that most people don’t have. ‘Soka would get touchy if I called his a gift, too. I’d sleep on the sofa. For a long time.”
“Jesus, that was more information than I needed,” Dean muttered. “So . . . the runt is psychic?” he added, cautiously broaching this subject.
Tsuzuki nodded. “He’s an empath. A little bit of a telepath, too.”
“Oh, great,” Dean said. “That’s what I need. Dead people who can hear my thoughts.”
“The telepathy really only works with physical contact.”
“Great. Dead people who know how I feel. Even better. He could have his own talk show.”
Tsuzuki gave Dean a quick glance. “Hisoka would be really angry if he heard you saying that. He’d really rather be without it.”
“Okay, now that we’ve all shared our feelings on the subject, let’s go find a demon’s lair,” Dean said.
Tsuzuki gave up. He muttered something about Americans, and then followed Dean in silence.
For about thirty seconds.
Then he found something shiny.
“Hey, what’s this?” he asked, leaning over. Dean was about to make an aggravated comment when he saw that it was a grate in the wall.
“Looks like a connector to the ventilation system,” he said. “So what.”
“So, the demon didn’t come down the tunnel we came down last night,” Tsuzuki said. “There was no demonic presence, no aura, in the hallway. Hisoka and I would have noticed – so would your little clicky machine there. It must have come through another way.” He looked at Dean expectantly.
“So its nest might not even be in the passage,” Dean said, and obligingly held the EMF detector down by the grate. Tsuzuki backed away so his own presence wouldn’t interfere, and grinned as it let out a loud beep. “Great,” Dean said.
“A grate!” Tsuzuki said, unable to resist. He saw the murderous look on Dean’s face, and meeped. “Sorry!”
“If you can walk through walls and shit, can you go in there?” Dean asked, gesturing to the vent.
“If there’s another room on the other side,” Tsuzuki said. “Which I can check,” he added, and disappeared. Dean scowled at the wall, his very posture indicating that he was angry about having to let Tsuzuki do this. “Oof,” Tsuzuki said, his voice muffled. “It’s really tight in here.”
“What is it?” Dean asked impatiently.
“Crawl space,” Tsuzuki said. “Just a vent system, like you said. So I really doubt it’s holed up in here. But the demonic presence is pretty strong. It’s been using these to get around. I’m coming out now.”
“Why?” Dean asked. “If it’s been using the tunnels, we can use them to find it.”
“But I can’t move,” Tsuzuki said. “And you’ve got broader shoulders than I do. ‘Soka’s the only one who could fit in here, and if I make him spend his vacation crawling around tunnels, he’ll . . . well, he won’t kill me, but it’ll be pretty drastic.”
Dean’s scowl deepened, and then Tsuzuki reappeared next to him.
“I’ll send a bird down,” Tsuzuki decided, not thinking to check this plan with Dean first. He took out a tracking ofuda and folded it out. Dean twitched slightly as a white bird alighted from Tsuzuki’s hand and took off down the tunnel.
“What the hell was that?”
“It’s a tracker spirit,” Tsuzuki said. “They’re just little . . .” He fumbled for English. “Self-thinking puppets.”
“How did the paper turn into a bird?” Dean asked.
“Magic?” Tsuzuki suggested.
Dean blinked. “Okay, and?”
Since they had a few minutes while they were waiting for the tracker spirit to come back, Tsuzuki pulled out an ofuda to demonstrate. “It’s a spell,” he explained. “It’s done by written word. This kanji here is – ”
“Yeah, whatever, I don’t care,” Dean said.
Tsuzuki sputtered. “You asked!”
“What’s it doing?”
“It’s going to go see where the tunnels go. Then it’ll come back and tell me. If there’s another room or something on the other end, it’ll let us know. Or, if it never comes back, that’ll also tell us something.”
“I guess,” Dean said.
Fortunately for Dean and Tsuzuki, the tracker spirit came back a few minutes later. It twittered for a few moments while Tsuzuki listened intently, and then disintegrated in a puff of light. Dean tried to not stare gap-jawed too obviously at this spectacle. Tsuzuki decided to be socially considerate and pretend that he hadn’t noticed.
“There are a couple rooms that the demon’s been in,” he said. “But it hadn’t been here for long. Probably a few days at most. I think it had been recently summoned.”
“How can you tell?” Dean asked.
“There’s not much there. And no victims. So it hadn’t needed to feed since getting here. It would have to stash the bodies somewhere, and this is a good place. Plenty of room to stash bodies without having to dirty its own nest.”
Dean frowned. “So, what does that tell us? Was it involved with the missing persons or not?”
“Involved, probably,” Tsuzuki said. “But I don’t think it’s the one who caused it. Unless it uses bodies really quickly.”
“In that case, this should be over,” Dean said. “Since you, uh, took care of it. But if it was going through the bodies really quickly, shouldn’t there be bodies here? Or bodies, period?”
“Yeah,” Tsuzuki said. “And it didn’t really seem to want one. It didn’t try to possess any of us.” He didn’t mention what he was thinking, that being that he had a tendency to have demons try to possess him. “I think we’ve learned all we can here. We should meet up with Hisoka and Sam, see what they’ve figured out.”
Dean shook his head as he started down the tunnel. “How can you be all idiot explorer one minute and professional investigator the next?”
“I know when to take things seriously and when not to,” Tsuzuki said. “I suggest you take it up, too. It’s good for you. Lowers blood pressure. Not that I have blood pressure, being dead and all. Well, sometimes I do. Never mind.”
~ ~ ~ ~