Yami No Matsuei Fan Fiction ❯ Standing Wave ❯ One-Shot

[ P - Pre-Teen ]

Blame this on my bud Jediah, who, upon watching Yami no Matsuei, questioned the state of Hisoka's language skills, given that he's stuck as a 16-year-old.

And it's slash-free. No, I don't understand, either. I write and think slash for the most odd fandoms, but my first bash for Yami is gen. Bah. What's next, a het Fake fic?

All of the named characters belong to Matsushita Yoko, BTW, a much better writer than yours truly.

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Sixteen is a bad age to die.

Not that there's ever really a good age to die, not a one, but as far as ages go, sixeen is quite bad. Sixteen is a time of uncertanty and restlessness, a time of burning hormones and incomplete change, a time between, not adult, not yet, but far and away from the soft stupidity of childhood.

And if sixteen is a bad age to die, it's an even worse age to be stuck in forever.

Hisoka wakes up every morning to look down on the frozen melting flesh of late puberty, hearing the thrum of a remembered heart that still beats and forces blood, but will never reach veins over another centimeter of growth. The brain that whirls, solving mysteries and thinking, always thinking, still runs on a crashed loop, sending out orders for changes that will never be finished. The face in the mirror...ah, the face in the mirror. Still stuck in the soft androgyny of late adolescence. He is 18...and 16. One day he will be 23...and 16. And some day, some day 108...and, yet, still 16.

The self hatred, that which all teens know and feel, Hisoka knows it better than any of them, and will for, most likely, the rest of time. The hatred of self, and the hatred of form, but hatred of form for better reason than even the ugliest living sixteen year old. His body, marrow to peach-fuzz facial hair, is the memory and image of a sixteen year old, and a sickly one at that. All the same, even as his mind piles on the years and the memories, one after the other, as he grows in mental breadth with every year...every week...every day.

Disconcerting isn't the word. There isn't a word for it, in any language, because the only others who have experienced it are too far away to create one.

There's a trick to survival, though. Well, not survival. Sanity? Afterlife? There's a trick to it. And it might just be that she was younger, or that she's been dead longer, but it's Wakaba...Wakaba, who might be forgiven if she was angrier, Wakaba, who will not only never see herself as a woman, but who will never see beyond the first moments of her flesh going melty like softened wax and reforming...it's Wakaba who figured it out. And maybe, even though she knows that he'll have to figure it out himself, maybe some day she'll corner Hisoka when no one else is around, and she'll tell him.

There's a trick to it, you know, and it's very simple, like all truly great revelations. It's simple and it sounds stupid when it's spoken of, but it works so well, and it explains why Enma would take youth as Shinigami, even with their failings. The trick is to not see everything as a wave frozen right before it's crest, as a wave stuck, trying to break off ancient signals, a wave that will never move, not like that. The trick is to stand up tall, and look at the motion, look at it unmoving, and to realize that a frozen wave looks like a hill, and to stand up tall on it, and look around, and see things from the different viewpoint...the things that Watari and Tsuzuki, Tatsumi and Terazuma, that they all forgot long before their deaths, long before their waves stilled and froze.

It's easy, when you think about it.