InuYasha Fan Fiction / Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ The Blue Anshan ❯ Seeking 5 - The Forest ( Chapter 9 )

The Blue Anshan

By Alesyira

Summary: Shippo suffers the consequences of dabbling in something he doesn't understand, but learns something new about himself in the process.

Chapter Rating: T. Nothing too crazy.

Disclaimer: Inuyasha and Yu Yu Hakusho are not mine. I made a few OCs to fill in my gaps.

Arc 2 - Seeking 5 - The Forest

1505

A few weeks later, Hu and I began to notice patches of ice and snow that indicated we had officially emerged from the desert. We had a much stronger appreciation of our friendship and I had gained a newfound understanding of myself. I began to spot increasingly abundant tufts of dried grasses and clumps of shrubs, and I could feel my energy returning naturally, like this was the only thing I'd ever need to survive. I felt so rejuvenated that I briefly believed I could survive without food, air, or water, so long as I had my plants.

Magic: it's mysterious.

At the first visible sign of trees, I gave a whooping laugh and sprinted headlong into the foliage. Even in the midst of winter, these trees stubbornly stored energy in evergreen needles that smelled sharp as the freezing weather. 'Ah, this must be what heaven smells like.' I hugged the first solid trunk I reached and rubbed my cheek against the rough surface, sighing in pleasure.

My companion eventually caught up and tugged me away from my tree-fondling. "In places like this, you have everything you need, but when it is gone, you will be left with nothing. This," she touched the small pouch at her waist, drawing my attention to it as she continued, "is something you must learn." I'd spotted her slipping fingers into its contents more than once, distracted as she stared off into the distance as though lost in memory. I frequently wondered what trinket she might have within, but hadn't pressed for answers.

Now, though, I could barely detect the concentrated golden warmth that I'd only recently begun to recognize. The sun had been hidden behind thick cloud cover for the last few days, but Hu had not been bothered by the lack of sunlight, and her energy hadn't wavered, even when she shared her reserves with me.

"This contains things precious to me. I set aside my warmth when I have plenty, and when I am in need, it helps." The concept made sense, but I had never seen anyone in my family doing such a thing. I knew only of what I had seen in my youth: elders in my family just had more tails. I suspected Hu was at least a few centuries old, but she only had two.

She looked around at the frozen ground and plucked a small rock from a patch of snow. "Jewels, rocks, flowers, feathers… it matters not what you use, only that you are careful with where you keep your treasures." This sounded tricky. What would happen if someone took her pouch? Was this what those legends had spoken of, that someone who took a kitsune's treasure had control over them? Surely if I stole her energy pouch she wouldn't suddenly be at my whim… she'd just go snack on some humans and wait for another sunny day.

Humans and their weird legends.

But I had to know if there was any truth behind the myth. "Why would you need to be careful where you keep your treasures?"

She scowled at me. "Because this takes forever to gather! You will see, this is much effort that one should not waste." She frowned at me and shook her head, likely thinking I was an absolute idiot.

We lingered at the edge of the forest for a week, doing little more than relaxing (and maybe throwing a few snowballs at each other). Hu wanted to wait for the thick cover of clouds to break apart some before we began practicing channeling energy. I meditated on the joys of being one with nature once again and soaked in the vitality around us.

"So, were you born with two tails?" I brushed my fingers through my single fluffy appendage to find any errant pine needles.

"No, I gained my second after I became a…" she paused, her face pinched as she searched for the word. She smirked and cupped her breasts to emphasize their presence. "Grown."

Okay, that kind of made sense?

"Did you just … wake up with it? Or did you have to do stuff to get it? Some people in my family had extra tails. My mother only had one. I'm not sure what they had to do for theirs."

Hu tapped her lip and searched her memories. "My mother had… many. My father had no tails at all, but he was different from you and I." She abruptly laughed at something and then waved her hand to deflect my interest about what had been so funny. "My second tail came to me while I played. I thought I had been poisoned by my partner, and so I killed him."

"I - you what? I don't understand."

"It was very painful. I thought my life was in danger, so I lashed out. I woke up to the ruined mess of a partner and our bed. My mother tried to explain that these moments happen when we have grown." Hu sighed and frowned. "She also reminded me that if I had stopped playing with humans I might not have killed anyone that day. I was lucky it wasn't someone I cared about."

I gawked at her. "You got your second tail because you were playing?"

Hu laughed. "Not just that, I was practicing how to snack. It's more fun when you are playing." She leaned forward suddenly and I tumbled backwards as she crawled over me to press her lips to mine. "It is too bad you and I cannot practice like that."

She pulled back and stared down at me in concern. "Maybe you will never get your second tail because you cannot snack."

I propped myself on an elbow and smirked up at her. Just because I couldn't steal from hapless horny victims the same way as Hu didn't mean I couldn't snack. I'd just have to learn how to be very convincing for my partners to share of their own accord. Or something. "I'm sure I can figure something out." I winked up at her and pulled her back down for another kiss.

She brushed glowing fingertips across my shoulder to give me some of her sunshine and I focused my attempts on sending her light into a pebble I'd picked up. I don't care to admit exactly how long I stared at that pebble before I figured out how to thread some of the light into its time-worn crystalline structure.

I closed my eyes to envision the magic and the tiny stone I wanted it to go to, and nudged it along my arms until I could force it out through my fingertips. Hu suddenly burst into laughter and applause. I glanced down in surprise to see that the little rock had started to glow with tiny sparkles, but it quickly faded back into a dull, useless stone.

She pulled a clouded glass bead from her pouch and showed me what her results looked like. With my regular sight, the small crystal looked normal and felt a little warm to the touch, but when I looked for the energy, I could see it glowing internally like the tiny flame within a paper lantern. It wasn't precisely like the sunshine she shared with me, instead like her inner fire had been tamed and calmed into a warm brown energy stew that hung out in its designated bowl until she got hungry.

This is what she meant by it taking forever. I had to convert my excess energy into something mild and bland so it would stay put and not break free from its confines. It was a stupidly slow process, and the effort to store even small quantities was literally draining.

I was better at storing my energy when I used something more familiar, like an acorn, and I loved my acorns. I'd managed to hang on to about a dozen through all my adventures and costume changes over the last several months, and they served me well, now, as I practiced the new skill of… "Hey, what would you call this?"

"Why does everything need a name? It just is."

I shrugged and continued working on my new skill of making treasures.

During this harsh time of year, the forest seemed more stubborn than I expected plants could possibly be and wouldn't share their reserves no matter how hard I tried to yank energy free. Hu couldn't guide me through this because the sun freely gave its light to everything, and she had no problems stealing energy from whomever she pleased (except me).

The slow trickle coming from the sleeping life around us would be plenty to keep me running, but wouldn't be enough to set aside for later.

A few days after we had started our energy practices, I discovered the key I'd been missing. I had been bored and noticed a weird sensation coming from a particular tree nearby, and so I knelt beside it and focused on what I could feel. The tree was suffering from something that didn't belong, so I reached out with a tiny thread of my energy to try and soothe the patch of angry red. I had no idea what I was doing. I placed my hands on the trunk and tried feeling for the trouble, searching for signs of what to do from the foliage around us.

Nothing.

I sighed and thumped my forehead against the rough material.

It felt like I was wasting my time. What was I even doing here?

An answering warmth tentatively reached out from the tree. My breath left my chest in a startled laugh at the unexpected reply. I smiled and closed my eyes and focused again on feeling. The patch of angry red had vanished to nearly nothing, and I had no idea what I'd done, but now I could see something new. The flicker of energy from the tree I'd helped was barely noticeable as a slim sense of grey in the darkness that surrounded us. Once I recognized it for what it was, though, the entire forest began to light up in the palest shades of grey like an army of ghostly slivers in the darkness. I stretched my senses out, reaching for the closest entities with touches of my magic to share with the forest surrounding me. Each sliver of grey I brushed answered with a tiny response of life. I could feel these little responses building within my spirit, and still I pushed outwards, stretching myself thin as I reached as far as I could manage. So much life; so much joy! The experience was thrilling.

A very faint noise reached me from far away, like the sound of someone shouting across a hundred miles. I think it may have been my companion, but I hoped it was Kagome, reaching out to me from wherever (whenever) she was. I stretched out my hand toward the void, praying that I might reach her through time.

Warm fingers wrapped like shackles around my wrist and yanked me back into awareness. A hundred thousand pinpricks of magic stabbed me from head to foot, and my joy at newfound discovery collapsed into more pain than I would have believed to be possible. I had been given far too much from the forest around me. I could see Hu above me, and I think she might have been shouting my name, but I could hear nothing over the roaring in my head.

I have no recollection of what happened next.

When I woke, it was late at night with the moon high above us. Hu had cradled my head in her lap as she sat quietly in a grassy clearing, running fingers through my sweat-dampened hair as she hummed a quiet melody. The air was sharp with the chill of winter, but I didn't feel cold anymore.

She did her best to fill in the blanks once I could speak again. At first, I had blindly fumbled for the acorns I had intended to fill with excess energy, but they could only hold a little bit of magic before sprouting into saplings and falling out of my hands to take root in the frozen soil. I guess my grip on how to 'convert' wasn't quite there.

I had writhed and thrashed on the snowy forest floor for much of the afternoon, switching between crying out for people she'd never met and flailing violently as my instincts to survive lashed out against the pain. She had wanted to help, but she'd remembered the agony of accidentally taking the purity and didn't dare attempt it, not even to save my life. Then she could see the changes and was glad she didn't try to stop the magic. The chaos presented by the thousand gifting trees became structure within my flesh and a second tail burst from my backside in an explosion of blood and mangled fabric. When I had finally finished twitching and fell asleep, pale white flowers began to appear from the bloodied snow, turning the small clearing into a vision of spring.

Gods, this was a mess. I had been traveling with and hoping to learn a thing or two from an older fellow kitsune, but we had enough differences and so many unknowns that we'd accidentally gotten into more trouble than either of us would have believed possible. I mean, we might both claim the fox as our animal, but it seemed we only had a few small similarities. I met her eyes, and I'm not sure what she read in my grim expression. I was pretty sure if we kept disregarding our obvious differences, one of us might meet a pretty gruesome accidental death. Twice in this season alone each of us had come close to exactly that: the end.

Maybe I was just being overly dramatic. I smiled up at her, still feeling pretty shaken by the experience but thankful that the worst of it seemed to be over. "That sucked."

She laughed. "Do you think if you do it again, you'll get another tail?" She ran her fingers through the pristine fur, visually comparing the variation in color between my old and new. I knew for certain that the forest within reach had given me all it could for now, so it would be impossible to try again while we remained in this place. Reaching out to the foliage around us had become an easy thing, as though the new tail was a physical indication that I'd unlocked some level of magical connection with the forest. I had the vague impression that if I attempted such a stunt again, I wouldn't have such a hard time accepting so many gifts of power, but I wasn't sure how it could be channeled yet. And lastly, the pain was still far too fresh in my memory.

…Maybe in a month or two, after the memory of full-body stabbing and ripping had time to be replaced by something worse. With my current track record, whatever happened next time would probably be both horribly painful and scary.

I shrugged. "You only got one new tail from playing, and I'm sure that was a long time ago."

She pursed her lips and hummed in agreement. "I should have dozens of tails," she snickered.

The story of my life: Shit Goes Crazy Because Shippo Dabbles in Something He Doesn't Understand.

Watch, my next adventure would end up burning down a village.