thenearshore | I'm just a mean green mother from outer space

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I'm just a mean green mother from outer space

Who: Gojyo (

erogappa) and Kurama (

herbalsupplements)
What: First annual Demon Pride festival
When: 12 April
Where: Xochipilli's temple
Warnings: Drug use!

"The plants will only eat you if you're smoking, Gojyo." His impression of Kurama is terrible -- it sounds nothing like him. "Smoking is bad for my bees, Gojyo." Seriously, that guy is just plain strange. It's not like he'd had his bees on him at the school! ...Or maybe he had. Gojyo pauses at the edge of the greenery and considers that for a moment. He could have been full of bees. There were definitely stranger things than that happening in heaven these days.

He'll have to ask about that.

But for now, he sucks down the last drag off his cigarette, stomping the filter out in the dirt with a brutal twist of his boot. Kurama's promised him a non-smoky alternative to cigarettes, which is the only reason he's willing to risk life and limb in the fox's smoker-eating jungle. (Well. It's not the only reason. But it's the only one he's willing to cop to, even to himself.)

"Oooooooooi!" he calls, stepping his first ginger step onto Xochipilli's land. "The currently not smoking god Dionysus is comin' to pay a call to some bee-lovin' fox, so nothin' better eat me!"

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Surgery or a spell sounds like too much effort, so Gojyo casually discards that idea (he didn't really want to look anything like Fung anyway), and goes back to playing with the sunlight between his fingers. Bright, dim. Bright, dim. The webbing down in the crook on his fingers turns a brilliant pink when he holds it up to the light (and it's not any bigger than anybody else's finger-webbing, regardless of what some stupid monkeys might say about kappa), and against the blue sky it's actually kinda pretty.

"Hey," he begins, turning to Kurama to share this bit of brilliance... but then he stops, mouth agape.

"Uh. Hey." He blinks again, but Kurama's fluffy ears don't vanish. "Am I seein' things, or are you all silvery now?"

Edited 2016-08-09 23:10 (UTC)

One ear turns in the direction of Gojyo's voice automatically. "You're not seeing things. This is my demon form." Even his voice is different, deeper than that of his human body, and "all silvery" is a fair description: his longer, straighter hair, the pointed ears on top of his head, and the richly-furred tail at the base of his spine are silver; his shoes, pants, and belted sleeveless robe all white.

Kurama sighs. "I wish my clothes wouldn't change, though. This outfit's supposed to be for thieving."

All that brilliant red hair is gone, just like that. Gojyo's suddenly very aware of the red strands at the edges of his own vision and, irritated, he roughly combs them back.

"I wish I could do that." If he were sober he wouldn't have said that. Hell, if he were sober he wouldn't have thought it, not really. Immediately he realizes what he said, and falls back on the grass again, cloud gazing in embarassment.

"Oi, if I smoke are your plants gonna eat me?" he asks as he flops back, his voice just a hair too loud. "Tell 'em not to, okay? I need a smoke."

"Just..." he waves a hand--fingers delicately clawed--in the vague direction of where I can't smell it. "Take it downwind of me. The plants will leave you alone." On that note, the bucket comes sliding back over, its contents emptied past the bottom step with the power of the Legendary Bandit while they've been here.

It seems odd, though, that Gojyo should want to change forms. He's pretty decent-looking, right? Kurama opens his eyes again--gold now, unlike everything else about him--and yeah, he may be the hairiest kappa he's ever met but that doesn't make Gojyo ugly. "Why do you want to change?"

Zero warming up there. Yeah, fine, Kurama will concede that he's not entirely sober himself.

Standing is more of a challenge than he was expecting -- it's not just that his legs don't quite want to respond or that his center of balance seems to be a bit further to the left and back than usual, but that he's feeling every muscle stretch, feeling the weight shift from his ass and the backs of his legs to his palm to the soles of his feet. It feels... he wants to say awesome, but he might mean scary too.

But Kurama's letting him smoke, and he's not going to waste the chance. He finds a spot where the wind whips his hair toward Kurama instead of away from, and figures he's good. At least, until Kurama starts talking again.

"You know why." That first drag is bliss (although his stomach rumbles warningly), and he doesn't even sound annoyed at all when he continues. "I'm half, remember? That's what th'red means."

Gojyo has, in fact, gone in exactly the wrong direction, but the correction dies on Kurama's lips at the answer to his question. Possible responses spring to mind: that he's met plenty of half-human children without that distinctive coloring, that one of his best friends is of mixed heritage, that there's nothing wrong with not being purely one or the other. All of these might lead to interesting or at least useful conversations, but the thing Kurama's really stuck on is the apparent association between "red" and "inferior", and that is something he will not let stand.

"My favorite flower is red, too." And then he reaches up behind his neck and pulls a rose out of his hair, thorns and all.

Look, he's very high, okay? Directions are difficult. He figures it out with his first exhale, as he watches the puff of smoke pool around his face and drift outward, thinning on its way toward... oh whoops, toward Kurama. Visibly apologetic, he gets one hand under him to aid his getting back up... but then Kurama pulls out a flower from the back of his head and Gojyo goes dead white.

"That's not..." he stutters, "I didn't..." His nausea is back in full force -- cigarette forgotten for the moment in his hand, Gojyo wrenches himself up, looking down in obvious distress. Looking everywhere but at Kurama.

"I'm gonna go."

Unacceptable. No one escapes Yoko unless he wants them to, especially not from his own home. Kurama springs into the air from where he was sitting and regrets it, his stomach roiling in violent protest at the sudden jostling. When he lands in front of Gojyo a moment later he looks more than a little green around the gills, but he's fine! He can do this. He pokes Gojyo in the chest with one finger, still clutching his rose.

"No," he says, and then he turns to the side and hello again, breakfast.

Gojyo reels back, his expression flashing from surprise, to disgust (use the bucket, man, geez), to anger.

"Whaddya mean, no?" he asks incredulously. The world is throbbing around him, threatening to knock his feet out from under him at any moment, but nothing helps him pull his shit together faster than a confrontation. The rose keeps drawing his attention, though -- it's hard for him to look away from it. "I'm not gonna sit here and..." He really can't look away from the rose. "...and talk about this shit with you."

Kurama wipes his mouth with his free hand, feeling physically better but still royally offended, and pokes Gojyo in the chest again.

"You don't get to come up here and then act like red is a bad color. It's the best color." Another poke at "best", and then he flickers and bleeds back to his human form, because fuck you, Dionysus, he makes an amazing redhead.

Kurama's hair turns red again (and his clothes change too, which is just weird, but Gojyo's not impressed with the magic act this time.

"Turn your eyes red too, asshole," he growls, folding his arms. "You think red is so great then go all th'way."

"It doesn't--" work that way, but no, it kind of does now, doesn't it? Kurama twists his energy the way this stupid place allowed him to, and then he's a motionless statue of pale marble with hundreds of tiny, glittering rubies for hair and eyes, the rose unchanged in his hand.

"Red is wonderful."

And then Kurama's covered in red glitter, like an icon of a hanyou might be in some backwards-ass world where they're worshipped instead of despised. It takes a minute for what he's seeing to sink in, but when it does, Gojyo just laughs. It's a sad, empty little laugh, and he quickly masks it with another drag off his cigarette.

"Shit," he says wonderingly. "You really believe that, don't you?" He doesn't mean it as an insult -- Kurama genuinely doesn't seem to see anything wrong with a full-blooded demon making himself look like a hanyou. It's completely beyond Gojyo's experience -- he's met demons who didn't judge hanyou, but none who would have taken that tolerance this far. "Guess I shoulda been born in Japan, huh?"

"Or at least not in China." He changes back, the cold immobility of being marble strange and uncomfortable right now, but it doesn't work quite right and Kurama raises a hand to sift the remaining rubies out of his hair. What do you say to a near stranger who's clearly a walking ball of trauma?

Oh, right. "I have math, science, and dance lessons at Menrva's most days of the week and train my shinki in the mornings, but otherwise my schedule is flexible. When are you free for magic lessons?" He doesn't quite feel like putting the rose back, so he smooths the thorns off with little more than a thought and pushes it back at Gojyo.

Hey, he's dealing with his trauma just fine, thank you! Repression and distraction are totally valid life choices.

"Um." He still gets magic lessons? That's clearly surprising. And then, belatedly, clearly very nice! "I'm usually up by noon?" he offers, fingers closing around the rose's stem of their own volition. He'll hand it off to the first pretty girl he sees, and vanish before she can even get a look at his face. "You're really gonna teach me how to do stuff?"

"Of course. Unless you expect someone else to show up who can, and I doubt they'll know half as much as I do." If he sounds proud, well, that would be because he is. You don't get to be as old as he is without picking up plenty of tricks, and aside from his friends back home and Mai here it's been a while since he's deigned to teach anyone. "How does 3:30 sound?"

If it turns out later that this was all one long complex hallucination from drinking too much tobacco water, and that he's actually lying on the grass puking, he's going to be so very disappointed.

"Three-thirty," he agrees. He hasn't made a scheduled time for anything in years, but he'll make this one. "Here?"

He's gonna learn how to do magic, like a real demon. Better, even, than the demons back home! This is amazing.

"Right here, every day until I say otherwise." Kurama puts his hands in his pockets, already thinking up a rough lesson plan and rather pleased with himself for turning such a prickly set of initial encounters around. "When can you start?"

Hey, he may not be planning to take much time for this out of the day to start, but it might as well be a job otherwise.

When? But he said three-thirty, right? Then what does he...?

Oh. Damn this stuff is really doing a number on his brain. "Tomorrow?" Assuming he'll be functional by tomorrow. Assuming he doesn't leave here and head into the Near Shore and get himself into a world of delightful trouble until this buzz wears off.

Kurama smiles, small but honest (and not at all betraying that he could really sit down right about now). "Good. I expect to see you then."

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I'm just a mean green mother from outer space

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