Disclaimer: YuYu Hakusho belongs to Yoshihiro Togashi

The third part in a three-part drabble series based on a similar theme: “Sometimes the scars you carry aren’t even your own.”

Scar
Glass

Kurama couldn’t sleep.

He uncurled from his balled-up position, lying flat on his back, his arms spread wide through the grass. He had been running since school ended that day, so he had gotten far enough away that the stars were clear in the sky and he could only smell the lingering presence of humans.

He pretended the excitement prevented him from sleeping. He ought to have celebrated himself into exhaustion, really—tomorrow Kurama revived from the dead. Not quite perfectly, and not quite entirely, because his soul had gotten fused into the human body’s, but returning home would still be better than staying behind.

He would have given up on sleep hours ago and simply continued walking, but the child’s night vision was miserably inadequate. So he had camped out in the field, listening to the grass rustle in the night, wishing his powers had returned enough that he could feel the plant life just by lying there.

His discomfort hadn’t caused the sleeplessness; this he knew instinctively, even though he was uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with the physical, and all too much to do with the mental. But it probably didn’t help that Shuuichi had only slept outside a handful of times—trial runs, he told himself now after the fact, to make sure his body could handle the return to Makai—and tended to like blankets and other such amenities. His human spirit dulled the elation the fox should have felt at being so close to nature and freedom again.

He shifted again, restlessly. He couldn’t lie still. The vague feeling of being haunted and hunted tormented him. Part of him wanted to run, as fast and as far as possible, until he no longer felt pursued. Another part whispered that if he simply went back, there would be no need for the uneasy feelings to chase him.

He had acquired a few scrapes on his arm as he’d made his way. He glanced at one of the fresher ones on the back of his hand, feeling it smart as he licked it. He closed his eyes, but the image didn’t go away.

He couldn’t sleep, because if he closed his eyes, he saw them. The scars on her arms. Shiori’s smiling face, asking if he was alright, as if the blood dripping down her arms didn’t exist. His stomach wrenched sickly; he knew what followed, the same as every other time he closed his eyes tonight, the same as every other time he had tried to leave. Kuronue’s face, Kuronue’s blood, Kuronue telling him to run as if it didn’t matter.

The guilt ate at him.

He didn’t simply see it, so opening his eyes didn’t help. He could feel the blood running along his own arms, a warm, wet gush. The pain lancing across his skin and deeper—as sharply as if the bounty hunter had him battered and wounded again, as if he were dying.

Shuuichi’s body was only that of a ten-year-old child’s; it didn’t handle the mental anguish well. He had already moved his campsite once tonight because he had gotten so sick and miserable.

He should have been exhilarated. He wanted to run away and go back home—he didn’t want to stay here with this.

But he couldn’t take the nightmares, and he couldn’t sleep. If Shuuichi’s night vision weren’t so pitiful that he was likely to injure himself trying to return to Shiori, he would have already given up and set out. For perhaps the first time in his life, Kurama felt truly pathetic and broken.

He couldn’t escape, and he didn’t know why.

…

-Windswift