You can't sell dreams to someone who has walked the path of nightmare.

--Anonymous

☯

景虎

"There is no grave that can hold me down. Put the gun away before you shoot yourself, why don't you? It's in both our interests that you do."

She stays as she is, with the nozzle of her gun trained on the back of his head, finger curled around the trigger. She can shoot him without a moment's hesitation, if she needs to. In the blink of an eye. Even Hengen are vulnerable to bullets.

But not this one.

Kagetora stands right where he stopped by the edge of the wharf at the warehouse. His back is turned to her. She knows he is unarmed. His magnificent tails are nowhere in sight, nowhere to act as the shield they had moments before when Rikuto shot at him from point-blank range. The tails appeared only momentarily, to block the bullets from hitting him. They were nine beautiful tails of silver-white, drawn with a single line of black at the tips. She'd stopped breathing, muscles locking as she stared at them in awe that defied Logic screaming at her to get a move on.

Then they disappeared when Kagetora flicked his wrist, and Rikuto collapsed.

For one horrible moment, she thought Rikuto's kill chip was activated. She thought that Agents at So Fu finally figured out that it wasn't him who killed the Mizushima's – it was her.

She has lived the last few months in constant tiptoeing terror that any minute now, just round that corner is an Agent marching down the corridor to take Rikuto down to the Doctor because they figured out some discrepancy in their reports that she missed, something, something, that she missed and now it's come back to take the only person she cares about away from her. Or that there is an Agent sitting at a computer with their finger hovering over the button that will blow his head to soggy brainy pieces on the pristine white walls So Fu love so much.

But nothing has happened.

The waiting for something to happen is far worse than the actual happening.

She glances briefly down at Rikuto. He lies on his back, gun still in his loosely clenched hand. It's natural for him to keep a hold of it, even when unconscious. Having his hand wrapped around the cold, dark, heavy metal of a gun is instinctive to him, as much as it is for a child to hold on to their most treasured stuffed animal when afraid of the dark.

His eyes are shut, skin pale from the cold rain smattering over his exposed body despite the standard issued black gear Agents wear for missions. She watches his chest rise and fall deeply for two seconds. His lashes waver as his eyes track the movements of things only he sees. He is unconscious. Sleeping. But alive.

That's not good enough.

Wake up, she wants to scream. Wake up!

He doesn't. He's so vulnerable, now. She hates it.

She looks up again at the Kitsune. If he can do that to Rikuto without touching him, without even looking at him as he kept his eyes focused on her alone, there is no way she is going to let herself go unarmed around him. She will never let herself be so vulnerable that anyone can ever hurt her. She will never let anyone hurt her the way Akira did before she killed him, the way Yamato did after she killed Akira for what he did to her, what she lies to Rikuto and everyone around her that he didn't do.

She will never let anyone hurt her, ever again. She will kill before she lets that happen, and she will die for it soon, she knows. But just as it is instinct for Rikuto to keep hold of his gun, it is so for her to kill.

After all, it's what she was trained for.

"I mean it, you know." He smiles winningly at her.

She returns the look by staring impassively at him. She could be an animate corpse, for all she reacts.

He rolls his eyes. "Put the gun down before you hurt someone you don't want to, sweet, innocent little Pai."

She pauses at the sound of her name on his lips.

How does he know her name? Not just her 'name', not one of the many aliases she's used in the last two and a half years that make her question which one is hers and which one is not. The one she uses now is Yin. So how does he know her name? Her real name.

Pai.

How does he know her as Pai?

"If you're wondering how I know your name," he asks with astounding accuracy. She narrows her eyes. He's a ninetails – what if he glimpsed her thoughts with one of his fantastical powers? He grins at her rakishly, a smile that is sure to have melted the knees of many a woman. "Then the answer is this; who do you think gave you your favourite blue ribbon when you were at some festival when you were eight? I'm almost insulted you don't remember me."

What?

"You are lying." She shoots back acidly, speaking against her better judgement.

He is lying. She would remember if she'd received any gifts from Hengen. Even at that young age, she'd been able to tell the difference between humans and Ayakashi. He is lying to rile her up.

He's lying, it was...who...no...

Her eyes widen as she trails off. She can't remember. She can't remember who gave it to her; only that it really had been at a Toro Nagashi festival that she received it. But any more than that, any more than a vague recollection of giving someone cotton candy, of looking up at someone tall smiling at her and presenting her the ribbon she so loved and had lost when everything ended and she was dragged into So Fu – any more than that is lost to a memory she is able to rely on less and less these days.

Kage-chan, Kuniumi whistles. Never lies.

Kagetora grins sharply. He lifts his hand, cocks his fingers, shapes a gun. He closes one eye. "Bingo."

He pulls his trigger.

She loses all sensation in her right hand clenched around the gun. She drops her gaze from his red one to her hand, expecting her fingers to loosen and to drop the gun. She can already tell, in an instant, that it is him making her hand so abruptly nerveless.

But instead of dropping it, hand controlled by strings of an unseen puppet master, her arm swings down and she's pointing the gun at Rikuto, painfully unguarded as he lies unconscious on the tarmac ground. Her lips part as she breathes his name, as if that's loud enough to wake him and make him move.

It's dangerous. He needs to move.

Please.

Her calling his name isn't enough to stir him. He remains flat on the ground, oblivious to the gun she has on him. Her forefinger curls around the trigger. She tries to force herself not to, to yank the gun away from pointing at Rikuto to the Kitsune it's supposed to be on.

She can't.

"Tell me," he asks curiously, walking in a half-circle around her. She follows him with her eyes, unable to move because of her imprisoned hand. "So Fu aren't imbecilic enough to come after Kings. You're still too weak. So Fu are especially not stupid enough to send anyone they have against me. Not even the man at the top of your food chain risks it, much as he wants to."

She keeps silent, grinding her teeth because every word he says is true. So Fu have never openly declared war on the Ayakashi because they're still not strong enough to face the combined power of all the Kings and Hengen attacking them to preserve their kind. It is why So Fu still operates in the shadows. The darkness where they can't be seen is the safest way for them to continue what they do without worrying about what retaliation they may receive from the Ayakashi world.

Everyone has been warned against the Kitsune King, specifically singled out by their superiors for reasons known only to those with high enough clearance. She doesn't know what could be so special about him. What makes him different from the other Kings.

Kagetora is a tricky one. He must be stronger than the other Kings. It is the only reason she can think of for So Fu to warn their soldiers away from him. They recognize strength, and the threat in it.

She wonders if 'King' is all he is, or if there is more to his story.

He cocks his head to the side, eyeing her speculatively. "Who are you after? Kirishima? The one you failed to kill last time?"

Her lips pull back over her teeth at the reminder of her failed mission. The one that set Akira on her, the one that made him think she was weak enough for him, the one that led to her killing him, and Yamato torturing her until her hair bled white ink that stains her black.

"Let me go." Her voice is quiet, and dead as her eyes, as her heart, her soul.

"Nope." The voice of a tetchy child than an Ayakashi King. "I don't want to. C'mon, tell me why you guys are so insistent on killing poor Kirishima. He's married, you know. You'll be widowing a beautiful woman who loves her husband. She just graduated from the University of Tokyo, too."

"Let me go." She repeats, ignoring the faint echo of her heart panging at the mention of Kirishima's wife. She knows everything about them both. Her only reprieve for being sent to kill a woman's husband, again, is that they have no children. No more orphans. "Or I will kill you."

She has already ended so many lives. What difference does one more make, one more that threatens to hurt the only person left in this world that she has anything to fight for; Rikuto.

"You've got it mixed up, sweet little Pai." He smirks cockily. "I'm the one with the gun on your precious boy over there."

She watches him for another long moment, her stomach clenching as she worries that he knows exactly who Rikuto is to her. No one should. Only Midori does. Maybe Kiku. No one can trace back their pasts to figure out who they are. Their parents made sure of it.

It takes barely a second for her to come to a decision. She doesn't want to do it because it takes too much energy. But what choice does she have? Kagetora said it himself. He's the one with the gun on her precious boy.

When she moves, it happens instantaneously.

A deep tug in the pit of her stomach. A chill creeps over her body, raising the hairs on her skin. The rain condenses as it falls around her, pebbling her. She feels nothing of it. Hail could fall from the sky, she would turn bloody and become nothing more than a bag of meat, and in this moment she will still feel nothing.

Something cold, wet, alive writhes over her free hand at her side. A moment later there is the sharp sound of wind sucking into a vacuum. She jerks her shoulder forward and her left hand moves, her finger is squeezing the trigger of the black gun borne from the nothing she fears and needs. She has conjured the gun from the dark power Kuniumi taught her to tap into, the power that is her [ability]. It allows her to create anything that can be used as a weapon of death.

The bullet explodes out of the gun in shadowy mist, curving through the air, flying straight for the middle of Kagetora's forehead.

Rikuto's [ability] may be accurate projectile missile aim, but she's not a bad shot herself. Maybe that would be something for her to be proud of, in another reality. Maybe that would be something for her to be proud of, if she hasn't used that skill to murder dozens of people in cold blood.

In the second the bullet would have shot through his head, he moves, too fast for her to see more than a blur. The bullet punches into the shipping crate he stood in front of, flattening from pressure and momentum and pushing a deep dent into the metal of the crate, before clattering to the ground.

Then he is suddenly at her side, standing closer than she'd ever want anyone to stand by her. A waft of familiar mint-scented tobacco blows past her in a breeze carried away by the quiet sea. Everything in time slows as he reaches out with a single outstretched finger. She sees his eyes, the crimson irises outlined in a thin limbal ring of black as opposed to the normal yellow for Hengen, so inhuman and terrifying to those who know nothing of the paranormal world coexisting with the natural one.

She remembers her own eyes, darkening to black in the mirror last night when she let Kuniumi take over her body for a few minutes, just so the pain of Midori's betrayal wouldn't hurt so much even though it's already been weeks and weeks since she found out.

In that single moment in time, their eyes were exactly alike. Flat, unfeeling, incapable of seeing anything good or worthwhile in this cruel and unforgiving world, and wanting only to see it all come to a fiery, bloody end.

The tip of his finger brushes over the glistening black metal of the gun, and it vanishes in a cloud of black smoke.

She stares at her empty hand.

How...how did he...

How did he know touching the weapons she creates from total darkness dissipate at the touch of someone other than her?

How, Kuniumi?!

You can never hurt one such as he, she sings ecstatically, too happy for Pai's liking. He is an immortal. He is older than you can possibly fathom. He knows of every trick you could ever pull on him – Touka already tried catching him off guard so many times.

She has no idea what Kuniumi is talking about, as per usual. But she has no time, and no choice. Much as she hates doing it, his proximity is too much for her. She drops the gun, the real, standard So Fu issued gun, and it clatters to the ground. Immediately, the strength returns to her right hand, as if all he was waiting for is for her to drop it. She yanks her hand to cradle in front of her chest as a wave of pins-and-needles surges through her entire arm, stinging her.

Half a second later she uses another part of her [ability] and bends the shadows around her, deepening them to black voids in the space between them. She squeezes her eyes shut as her stomach plunges to the ground, and forces herself to envision standing anywhere but beside the man who knows how to neutralize her [ability] with a single touch.

When she releases the dark power and opens her eyes again, she is ten feet from Kagetora.

He remains watching, expressionless and unfazed by her power. But she sees something – there, a spark of recognition in his eyes. It's like he knows the power, knows it and has seen it used before. She struggles to keep herself from lashing out at him with more of the weapons Kuniumi trained her to make from nothing. If the gun didn't work, nothing will. They all come from the same place.

If Kuniumi says nothing she does can hurt him, then nothing she does will hurt him.

Kagetora eyes her speculatively. "You look like her, except the eyes." He says, voice low but pitched in a way that there is no possibility of her missing it. "Isn't that ironic."

She frowns. The wind sighs heavily at his words, waves of the Sea of Japan rippling as the breeze ruffles her white hair pulled into a high, tight ponytail braided down her back. She doesn't understand him. If Kuniumi says that she does understand, but from someone else –

She freezes. If Kuniumi says those words, she's talking about Touka. If someone else says them...

Touka...and Kagetora...she thinks slowly, connecting dots obscured in thick mist. They both make you sad. You grieve for them. Why?

Kuniumi does not disappear to the cloud-ground world like is habitual for her when she doesn't like situations like this at hand, when she doesn't want to answer any questions. Instead she lingers, yet seals her lips and refuses to speak, ignoring the white-hot iron rods Pai pokes at her to try and get her to answer.

Kagetora tilts his head to the side as he puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His eyes flash with something that unsettles her to the core. She blinks, and in that second Kagetora is standing right in front of her. She doesn't flinch; her training is too ingrained into the fibre of her very being, but her heart almost stops beating.

For a second, she considers using the power again to move away, but she knows now he can just as easily follow her wherever she goes. Using the power will only drain her, exhaust her, and in the end it'll be useless anyway. She needs to be alert now, aware enough of his every move to protect herself and Rikuto from anything he tries to do.

"You're talking to her right now, aren't you?" he probes quietly, smiling with something that is half-satirical, half-sad. "Asking her how I know you look like Touka."

She pales. She drops her hands to hang limply at her sides as she stares at him uncomprehendingly, jaw slackening in shock.

It can't be.

He doesn't make sense.

It can't be.

He can't know. He can't.

No one knows. It's not possible. No one is strong enough to hear Kuniumi's voice through the cracks in her mental shields. No one is strong enough to notice the presence of someone else inside her.

No one.

Kuniumi stirs restlessly. She's agitated. Pai can sense a warning in Kuniumi's barely felt thoughts, in the virulent emotions that swirl between her and Kuniumi that so often makes her wonder where the strange woman ends, and where the broken girl begins.

"You..." she gulps, a boulder stuck in her throat. She's breaking at the thought that someone knows. "You know Kuniumi?"

"Is that what she's calling herself now?" he scoffs derisively.

She doesn't understand what he means. She's confused, lost amidst the myriad of her thoughts, and she hates this feeling of utter powerlessness.

"What?"

"I thought she'd do what she did last time. She didn't hide herself then. She went by her original name two hundred years ago. When she ruined everything and let So Fu be born."

Shut up, Kuniumi growls. Her mouth opens before she can stop it, and she's snapping, "Shut up, shut up! We didn't make So Fu!"

The temperature around her drops.

Kagetora scowls, the red of his eyes glowing with such ferocity at the words she's just spoken, the words that aren't hers. Her stomach curls painfully as her breath mists in the rain, and she shakes her head vehemently. She tries to put her hands up as one would when facing armed law enforcement, but she can't. She takes a step back from the deadly Kitsune before her, trying to tell him that it isn't her speaking, yet finding no words can come through. She can't move her own body.

Stop it, she yells within the caged walls of her mind. She tries to move her hands, but her body does not respond to her will. Only her fingers twitch. Give me back my body! Give it back!

Kuniumi doesn't take over like she's done only once before. Then she controlled this body's every move. Now she doesn't let Pai speak, she doesn't let Pai move. Instead, she speaks to Kagetora through Pai, with a desperation borne only from someone who hasn't been heard in so long can muster.

She is afraid now. Pai doesn't understand what's happening. Why?

This was supposed to be an ordinary mission. Chiasa sent them to stake out whether or not the information they'd received on a lone Kitsune wandering around Nishi-ku was real, information that said her first failed mission, Kirishima, was meeting the Kitsune to strike a black market deal that would funnel more armed resources and funds into the Kitsune Clan as they set up trade agreements with the Ookami.

If so, they were to capture the Kitsune and Kirishima and bring them back for the Doctor. She was sent because Kirishima is her first failed mission, and this time she's supposed to make sure he ends in either the Doctor's quarters, or with a hole through the middle of his forehead.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this.

The Kitsune they were told about isn't supposed to be their King. He isn't supposed to be Kagetora, he isn't supposed to know Kuniumi is here, he isn't supposed to be able to talk to her through Pai like this, so suddenly and without warning.

And yet he is the King. He is Kagetora. And yet he is.

"I don't care what you did." The glacial tone of his voice drenches her in ice water, and she's quaking in her boots, trying to fight off the wave of fear ploughing through her. "I care what you didn't do."

"No," she keens, her face twisting with pain in the face of the overwhelming grief that belongs to Kuniumi, shoved to the forefront at the stinging accusation in his words. Her irises blacken as Kuniumi completely takes over. "No, Kagetora, it was Manami, she..."

Kagetora's lips curl at her words, at the guilt in them, his elongated canines flashing from the lights lining the wharf. "Manami didn't kill Touka. You did. You took what is most precious to me away. You took them from me."

Kuniumi shakes her head through Pai. Images flash before her eyes.

A woman with beautiful black hair, long and curled, bleeds from an arrow in her chest, just below her ribs. Another woman kneels over her, this one with red-brown hair and eyes that so look like Shiori, it takes Pai's breath away. The second is weeping, her arms around the fallen woman as the black-haired beauty smiles, lips pale as death and stained with blood as they faintly shape words, breath rattling in her chest.

The dying woman looks exactly like Midori. Her eyes are the same unusual shade of mint green that always attract unwanted attention to Midori. The high cheekbones, the little curl at the corner of her lips that make her look permanently mischievous. It's all the same.

The picture fades away.

It is replaced with another, a forest burning, the sky tinged orange with flames licking up the tall branches of the blackening trees, the snow-covered ground running red with the blood of humans, of Hengen, of Onmyoji, all mingled together. Women screaming, children crying, men yelling, the clash of metal screeching on metal ringing through the smoky, suffocating air.

Kuniumi shoves the picture-memories back, throwing up fog over them to conceal their secrets. Pai gapes at the memory of the woman who looked so like her sister. She tries to ask who she was, but Kuniumi is still controlling her body, speaking to Kagetora through her.

"We didn't," she shakes her head. "We didn't mean to."

His eyes have hardened to blood diamonds. He takes a step forward, and she pulls back, her body moving on automaton that even Kuniumi cannot stop. "Tell me why I shouldn't take away what you treasure most."

In the mind of the one who was born in the white-haired girl's body, she is screaming at him that it's not her he's talking to, it's Kuniumi. In her mind she is railing at Kuniumi to give back her body, to stop talking to the Kitsune through her.

But Kuniumi is not stopping. She's crying, crying so loud that Pai can't block the sound out. Her hands lift to her ears, but Pai doesn't know if it's her controlling her hands, trying to stop listening to the sound of Kuniumi's grief, or if it is Kuniumi trying to block Kagetora out.

She is only aware of the tears wetting her cheeks, staining them red with blood, when he touches her, cupping her face in his hands. She does not know who the tears belong to – her, or Kuniumi. His move is so gentle, so at odds with the arctic bite of his words as he tips her head up to look into the burning fervour of his blood-red eyes.

"Tell me," he says, either blissfully unaware of the turmoil raging inside the head of the girl who looks up at him with terrified eyes, or ignoring it. "Why I shouldn't take away your chance to use Pai and get your fucking revenge on him."

She is afraid, more than she has ever been in her entire life, more than when she faced her first Ayakashi, her first kill. But at the same time, it is like a gaping hole of black despair has opened up inside her. She is sad. So, so sad. It is all she can do not to drown in it, not to cry out in despair.

"Answer me," he grounds out through his teeth. "Should I give it to her? The choice to live, or die. If she knew all that is coming because you picked her, if she knew all the sorrow that will hound her like a mad dog, what would she choose? Should I let Pai choose her own fate?"

And then they snap.

Kuniumi snaps. Pai snaps. Everything disappears into red mist that burns.

They open their mouth and scream in his face. Their lips twist into a sneer of hate. The whites of their eyes blacken as all the pain, and rage, and betrayal slam into their body and cripples them to kneel on the wet ground as it rips through them. Their scream pitches so loud that Kagetora stumbles back and lifts his hands to his ears as he stares at her, blood dripping down between his fingers clamped over his ears as he stares at the white-haired girl and black-haired woman with tendrils of dark smoke whipping about them in a furore

And she breaks.