find me a find, catch me a catch (closed)

[reformedsinner]

Who: Cho Hakkai and Kozukata Yuri
What: Hakkai discovers he has a new goddess. Maybe the fourth time's the charm?
Where: Yuri's temple
When: Morning, June 12th
Warnings: Mention of suicide/self-destructive tendencies.

[Hakkai rarely sleeps in, but for once, he finds himself floating slowly back to consciousness well after dawn. His half-open eyes register, blurrily, filtered sunlight lighting the room. The bed is soft, and he rolls over, tugging a sheet up over his shoulders.

The bed is very soft. Springs creak softly in the mattress as he moves, and alarm filters slowly down through his sleepy thoughts. He had not gone to sleep in a bed with a mattress, after all. He'd gone to sleep on a futon in the spare room at the school. It had not been nearly so comfortable, and the window was in the wrong place, and --

Like a fuse burning down to the charge, the alarm finally hits him and he is propelled violently to his feet, fists clenching as he stares around the room. He'd thought he had time. He had thought a few days without a god wouldn't be too much, when some shinki had gone much longer than that. He had been wrong, he admits bitterly, and looks down at his hands. The only markings there are his vines, winding up his wrists in a green so dark that it's almost black to disappear under the soft long-sleeved T-shirt he'd worn to bed in an entirely different place last night. There isn't a mirror in the room. If he wants to find his new name, he's going to have to leave it, and face his new god.

Who is his new god? Hakkai rubs the back of his hand over his left eye, brushing away the grittiness of sleep, and blinks against the blurriness left behind for a few seconds. He doesn't really want to know. He doesn't recognize the bedroom, but he hasn't seen the inside of many temples, either. After a second of indecision, he closes his eyes, opens them again, and walks over to the window, looking out onto the temple grounds.

A rotting noose hangs from a tree not ten paces outside the window.

This is Yuri's temple.

Panic surges back up to close icy hands around his throat, and he stumbles back until one leg hits the bed and he sits down hard. No. He doesn't want to lose another god. He doesn't want to lose another friend. If he's a curse -- and he is a curse, isn't he? The certainty, owing less to logic than he wishes it did, sickens him -- then there are gods who can handle themselves, and gods whose loss he won't mourn, and he doesn't care about going without if he has no other choice. But not her. He checks his hands again, as though a name could have appeared without his noticing, and then looks again out the window.

There's a faint image of his face reflected there, almost invisible, but enough to pick out a tracery of red down the right side of his face, across the lid of his false eye, curling around the end of the vine on his cheek. There's no doubting it: he has a new goddess.

Cold and faint, Hakkai closes his eyes again, and leans on the windowsill as he fights to pull himself back under control.]

Comments

[onerous]

[Hakkai would be hardpressed to find a mirror at all in the temple, the few there are usually covered up in some way. The one in Yuri's room, attached to her vanity, is firmly covered with a sheet, removed only if and when she goes about applying make-up; and sometimes, like today, the sheet manages to slide off and expose the glass.

It's one of the first signs that something is very off about this day, if the nightmare she'd woken from hadn't been enough. A nightmare--about Hakkai? That's what she'd wanted to believe, but there was a terrible gut feeling when she woke with a start that it wasn't just that. It was never that simple.

She can feel he's there and knows the panic that flickers up isn't her own. Alright, so he's awake and aware too, but-- But if he's here and apparently, suddenly, her shinki now without her naming him herself, then that meant Ukoku was...

Yuri closes her eyes a moment against the unexpected wave of disappointment. It's not surprising, she's not at all surprised that Ukoku might have disappeared or been taken out by the Heavens or whatever happened to disappeared gods, it's exactly the direction she suspected things would go, eventually, but...

The feelings get pushed aside--it's useless to dwell on when she can't even shed a tear (and how irritating is that, too?), especially when there's something more important to worry about in the here and now that she could actually do something about. Propelled by that thought, she rolls out of bed, half-stumbling out the door towards the room she knows he's in

The rest of how she was going to confront this hadn't really occurred to her, a thought that rears its head when she stands at the door, fingers curled around the handle. (Ruefully she thinks she should've at least changed out of pajamas, but at least t's just shorts a t-shirt or else this could'e gotten weird). She should knock, at least, or something, but after a moment she opens the door anyhow.

--Ah. So there he was. Somehow seeing him in the room that's now clearly his own makes everything more real. Ukoku is gone, and he's her shinki now. Her hand drops to her side and Yuri realizes she's come completely unprepared with anything to say here.

She looks at Hakkai for a long moment and then away, collecting her own thoughts; her hand reaches out to curl around the door handle again with a quiet sigh.]

I should've brought coffee before I came; I didn't think it through. [Yuri glances to him, musing thoughtfully] I suppose I should say something like... 'Welcome home'...?