vivememorleti | all one-way sympathies

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dean winchester

all one-way sympathies

Even toward the end of winter, it got dark early, and Kisuke soon found himself in the back of the cafe, in the shop, sitting at a low table under dim gold lights that made him yawn broadly enough to rub at his jaw where it stretched umcomfortably. He hadn't had any after-hours customers all evening, and had decided eventually to do some of the paperwork from the cafe just so that the night didn't feel like a total loss.

There'd been no sound for some time beside the meow from across the building, and the scratch of his own pen on paper. The regular swish of cars back and forth on Darrow's streets outside. But it catches Kisuke's attention when one of the cars slows, and he looks up to watch it park nearby, a bright red thing that still manages to stand out between one gray Toyota and the next on Darrow's streets.

Putting his work aside, Kisuke dropped the pen he'd been chewing at idly as he worked to the desk and stood to cross the distance, parting some of the wooden blinds to better peer out of the gap between the slats.

Realizing just who it is, he doesn't bother to disguise his stare from the window, but moves to the door when Dean Winchester finally exits his car and crosses the street. He unlocks it, poking his head out. The air fogs his breath, grabbing it and pulling it away.

"You look like you've had it rough," he says, searching out Dean's face.

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Dean doesn't argue, passing his hand over the too long scruff on his cheeks. He eats, he sleeps, and bathes, he makes sure that everyone else under his roof does the same, but where the necessities end, so too does Dean's attention these days.

"Maybe," he concedes, breathing through the too quick thump of his heart. He's nervous and guilty and desperate, probably the worst combination of things he could be crossing this particular man's threshold, but Dean knows if the right offer comes, he's gonna take it.

Dean sighs and meets Kisuke's eyes. "Is it after hours?"

"The cafe's been closed since four, so," Kisuke says, which might as well have been a 'yes.' Allowing Dean to enter, he follows him in with his eyes, before reaching beside the door for a sign that reads 'NO. GO HOME.' which he hangs neatly on the knob before closing the shop's back door and locking it behind himself.

"You're tachy," he says, nodding toward Dean's chest. "You only get so many heartbeats in your life, you should think about how you want to use them. I'd tell you to come back when you were doing better, but I get the feeling that if I said things like that, a person like you would never find a better opportunity than right now. Instead, I'll just tell you to calm down. There's nothing to be afraid of here. The only thing that exists under my roof is opportunity."

Crouching by one of the tatami mats by the wall, after a few moments' jiggling, he manages to get his fingers under the edges to lift it, and the subflooring, off of the square hole in the ground beneath it

"I guess you made up your mind, though. You don't come all the way to death's doorstep just to say 'no.'"

"I don't expect I'll change my mind," says Dean, but he does leave himself the out. He breathes in through his nose, willing his heartrate down in increments. "I've made some bad deals in my time, that's all. I'm not anxious to make another."

This isn't the crossroads, and Dean knows that, doesn't trust Kisuke, per se, but he does trust that what he's offering is a better deal than most. He can make Dean stronger, and Dean doesn't think he's ever needed it more.

"What's in the hole?"

"I don't make deals," Kisuke declares, nose upturned in his voice at the very thought. "If we're talking about my merchandise, then I always charge my best low price. And if we're talking about other things ... I prefer to think that I help others find their true potential by nourishing their minds and bodies and hydrating their souls. Or something like that."

Shrugging broad shoulders, he stares Dean down quietly for another minute. The reassurance that Dean doesn't expect that he'll change his mind is a relief. It wouldn't do either of them any good if Dean went into the decision without any sense of certainty at all. Even if the kind of certainty he grabs for now stinks of desperation, Kisuke can work with that.

"We're going down the hole," he adds brightly. "At the bottom of the hole is a swanky space-time dimension. We can do whatever we want down there without bothering anyone in the city or causing any damage or anything like that. I've made loads of them, it's great, you'll be impressed. Kuchiki-san's been using this one, but not on a daily basis. It looks just like a field in the spring except you can't tell time for the life of you down there, it's great."

Not a demon, but certainly a salesman. Kisuke has a way of phrasing everything like it's the best thing ever, but Dean does not rush to the hole to throw himself down it.

Instead, he raises a brow, his only other movement to shrug out of his coat. "I won't come back up and find that a hundred years have passed, right?

"You'll be fine," Kisuke promises, nodding down the hole. He lifts himself up to settle onto the side of it, legs dangling into the space below. The air from down in the space is cooler than the air in the room, but only barely. It'll be good, come summer. In winter, he just finds himself wishing he'd decided to put shoes on first.

"Time isn't augmented down there. It flows the same way as it does up here. It's only the space that's been warped. I don't have a great deal of skill with time-manipulation spells to begin with, they take me weeks to prepare, and being in this place .. we'll just say that there's a limit to what I can do where there wasn't before, and we'll keep that just between the two of us."

"Jesus," Dean mutters, but he comes forward, staring first at what may very well be a mad man, and then down the length of the hole. It's green down there past the funnel of dirt, the light warmer than the city outside Kisuke's window, and hell if it doesn't smell like spring.

"Okay," Dean exhales, and thinks Kisuke's not the only crazy man in the room after all. "After you."

With a soft chuff of silent laughteer, Kisuke bows his head momentarily. "As you wish, sir," he tells Dean, before tightening his grip around his cane, and turning to hook his bare feet on the rungs of the ladder beneath him. He dutifully follows the track of the ladder, easily over a hundred feet tall, at least until the trip is over half over.

At which point, bored of the task of climbing, he drops his grip and lands carefully to the ground below, the slap of the bare soles of his feet against solid earth quiet and contrary, despite the height of the fall. But there's no reason to pretend in front of Dean Winchester that he's anything that he isn't.

"This is your classroom for now. If you keep an open mind and let me annoy you for a little while, I'm sure you'll be able to get the strength to do the job the way you want to do it."

Somewhere above him, Dean finds it in himself to roll his eyes at the theatrics, but hangs onto the sides of the ladder with the flat of his boots and his palms and slides the rest of the way down.

He lands in what feels like the grass of any other field, and Dean cranes his head upward to confirm that there's still a way out. There is, and yet, Dean can't help but feel that he's past the point of no return.

"Okay," he says, turning back to Kisuke. "I guess I'm your padawan. Tell me what to do."

Kisuke offers a brief smile to Dean before folding his hands over his hips and taking a long look around the area, more to give his eyes nowhere particular to rest while he thinks over what's to be done, than anything. There are still faint traces of Kuchiki Rukia's energy around the space, but only very faint, and brittle. Nothing to worry about, other than that.

"First we've got to get you naked," Kisuke decides, stepping a few feet forward. "You're wearing too much for this exercise."

He doesn't need to move closer than that to reach out to Dean with the foot of his cane. Pressing it against Dean's forehead, he gives a pointed press backward, applying pressure until the body falls away into a limp pile on the ground, followed by the thin clatter of lengths of chain. It leaves Dean standing there still, but a Dean of a different color - a soul cleanly removed of its body.

"Don't forget to breathe."

It's a lot of worrying things at once, and Dean hardly gets a moment to mull over any of them - Kisuke coming closer, the whole naked comment, the sudden push. It's like when Rukia expelled him topside, his soul sliding out as neat and smooth as a glove...and then it's very much not.

Dean fights the heaviness weighing down on him, the sudden pressure in his lungs. Kisuke says breathe, and Dean does, but it isn't helping like it should. His gaze flicks up, stubbornness keeping him upright despite the nauseous discomfort. "And then?" he grinds out, gasping another breath.

Distracted, Kisuke doesn't immediately answer Dean's question, instead crouching to lift a long section of the silvery chain, glinting in the diffuse light of the training grounds. He's never seen anything quite like it before; Dean Winchester's Chain of Fate looks almost as if it were repaired, several times. Which isn't possible. Kisuke should know better than anyone, what is and isn't. It isn't possible by his hand, using his technology and his spells. But apparently, something out there is capable of it.

"Sorry," he apologizes, turning his attention back to Dean and the task at hand. He quickly tugs off the billow of his dark green silk jacket and sets it aside, along with his hat, leaving himself dressed onto in his green jinbei, and he leaves the clothes there in a small pile, along with his cane, before standing and moving a few feet away to shake out his wrists and stretch his arms over his head, shoulders popping.

"The first step is for you to gain spiritual power. Right now, you're used to exerting force with your physical body You're used to doing everything with your physical body. Your spirit is like a muscle that never gets used. It's undeveloped, and weak. So you can't even begin to develop spiritual power. The fastest and most efficient way for a soul to become stronger is when it's under duress. When it's being threatened with destruction. So I guess in this case, step one is actually this; you're going to defend yourself against my open-handed blows. Please be aware that this is a one-shot victory. You won't get a second chance if you fail."

He doesn't know why, but it makes him twitch, the way Kisuke examines his chain. It's weird enough that he even has one right now, and it doesn't help that it seems to be something Kisuke doesn't expect. Dean swallows it down along with everything else, though, when Kisuke explains what's happening.

Even then, Dean can't say he entirely agrees. His soul didn't get up to anything good in the decades it spent in Hell, but it sure got used, and it was nearly all duress. He's not gonna argue the point, however, not when there's every chance that the only way he gets topside again is if Kisuke is kind enough to drag his corpse back up that ladder.

So he nods and squares his feet, ready to face a crazy man in a pair of green goddamn pajamas. "Awesome."

"You should dodge me seriously," Kisuke says, bouncing on the balls of his feet for a few seconds to let Dean know that he's ready. "Or you really might die."

Launching an open hand forward, the blow seems normal at first. A smooth and well-trained palm strike. But somewhere between the start of the thrust and its approach, the blow gains speed and force. By the time that it reaches the space where Dean's shoulder had been, it might as well have been the moving grill of a diesel engine, and Kisuke is left simply with a prayer that Dean had the instinct, and the latent power to summon, to get out of the way.

He's quietly relieved when his palm strikes at nothing but empty space, the compressed air trapped in front of it explodingoutward with a sharp crack. Kisuke lifts his free hand to the top of his head, grasping for the hat he's not wearing to hold it still against the rush of air as his eyes search for Dean, ears listening for the tinkle of the chain attached to his chest.

Wild-eyed, panting, and still alive, Dean stands just beyond Kisuke's forward vision, not within quick reach but not nearly far enough. He's not completely sure what happened, only that Kisuke charged and Dean moved, following his instincts out of the arms of his own demise.

And he can breathe. Dean draws another breath into his lungs, shoulders rolling beneath the sudden, absent weight, and awaits Kisuke's next move. He feels better, but he doesn't want to trust that one dodge is enough, not if he could die down here.

"Found you," Kisuke calls, sing-song - not much differently than a child on a playground - before twisting in the dirt and grass in his bare feet to swing with his opposite arm, a fist this time, thrown with normal human force but jack-hammer fast and precise. There's no reason not to keep this up for as long as Dean allows it, or can manage, or until Kisuke grows bored, at any rate. Although the first blow was the one that truly mattered, building endurance would never be a bad idea, nor would practice, now and again.

"Did you feel it?" he asks. "The way your heart skipped a beat?"

"Yeah," Dean answers, deflecting Kisuke's fist into the empty space over his own shoulder with a matching precision. This much, he's been training for since he was twelve years old. Pulling his free hand back, Dean throws a punch of his own, right between Kisuke's eyes. Maybe defense is all that's needed, but it's hard to be satisfied with that.

"I feel better already."

The fist whips into his skull before he realizes what's happening. He'd expected Dean to focus on defending for some time. That he's already turned an offensive on Kisuke in turn means that he's capable of meeting him for speed, if not exceeding it. Which maybe shouldn't come as so much of a surprise. He'd never left his artificial body before starting this. As long as he was the one of the offensive, it didn't matter as much He could still use nearly as much force in this body as he could outside of it.

But it does limit him if the tables are turned. He can only move as fast as the body allows for. Which is not as fast as he needed to to avoid a blood nose.

At the sound of a crack and the feel of the first few drops of wet on his upper lip, he backs away, laughing. and holds up a palm. "That's great," he decides, voice still chipper, despite the way it's garbled by one of his white hands cupping at his nose aggressively. "Because my face hurts, so I don't feel better at all. Time. Time out."

Dean hadn't expected that blow to land, and more surprising still is the call for time out, starkly informal in the middle of what Dean's sure could have been a fight to the death.

He pauses, but doesn't lower his guard, watching Kisuke with wide eyes. "Was I not supposed to do that?" he finally asks, finding that his disembodied soul can still flush red in the face. "Um. Sorry."

"You don't have anything to apologize for," Kisuke assures Dean, waving the idea away with his own clean hand before staring down at the bright mess in his other palm quietly for a few seconds. It seems like a waste to bleed if he doesn't have Benihime in his hands. She always liked the color of it, blood-red on bone-white skin. Kisuke folds his hand away and wipes it on the seat of his pants with a soft sigh.

"You're a scary guy, Winchester-san. I didn't expect you to be able to keep up with me like that for so long. I should have anticipated that it could happen; I could have left my gigai upstairs. But I didn't. These artificial bodies allow us to do a lot of things. What they don't allow us to do is use the majority of our abilities. I can augment the power of my blows -- enough to make this work -- but as far as speed goes, the most I can do is barely above human. Which is the important thing."

Raising both hands in the air, Kisuke gave a small clap, offering Dean a broad smile One third of the way was no small matter.

"Congratulations, stage one was a success. Like I said, it was a one-shot victory. You won the moment you dodged that first hit. You've started awakening your spiritual power."

"Maybe I cheated," says Dean, though he hasn't thought of it like that until now. To be fair, he isn't entirely equipped to understand everything that Kisuke's throwing at him, but he wants to get this right.

"I've been reduced to my soul before. Dead," says Dean frankly, "And most definitely under duress. It was nothing like this, and whatever power I might have found at that time, I don't want it now. I don't want anything like it. I just want what you can give me. Like what Rukia has. She does good." Dean squares his shoulders, mouth a thin, determined line.

"That's all I want."

"Your Chain of Fate," Kisuke says, lifting a long, pale finger to point at the length of silver chain dangling from the mooring at the center of Dean's chest. "Looked like it had been broken before, and reforged. That was interesting. I had an idea you'd been into something interesting before, but how interesting, that was the question. Where I come from, the dead don't come back. Not that way, anyway. There are ways to work around the limitations of 'dead' and 'alive,' but only God can truly unite a soul and a body. That might not be the case where you're from."

He shrugs.

"Kuchiki-san certainly does good. Unlike me, she's a serious and responsible young lady. If you want to be anything like that, you have my blessing. I want to give you what you want. Well, we wouldn't be here otherwise, would we? I can give you what Kuchiki-san has, if that's what you want, but I want to give you a working definition. The power I can help you grab for yourself isn't a genuine reaper's blade. But it's a close enough facsimile. The concept is the same."

Squinting, Kisuke turned his head away to peer into the middle distance He snapped his eyes back to Dean's face a moment later.

"A reaper is one who controls death. When you grip that blade, you control death. But while your hands control death, they can't embrace life."

Edited 2014-03-09 20:22 (UTC)

Like much of what Kisuke says, Dean can't decide if this missive is literal or poetry, the roadmap Kisuke lays ever littered with metaphor.

"That sounds like more than 'don't mix business with pleasure'," he says. "Does that mean I can't use the blade unless I'm like this?" He thinks back to Rukia extracting his soul with a neat little push, how much he could see once free of his body. "I have to be just a soul?"

"No, no," Kisuke says, waving a hand dismissively. "You're fine in that body of yours. You're connected to it by that chain still anyway, so it's dangerous to leave it. What I mean is ... don't take having the power I'm going to pull out of you to mean that you need to always use it. It's not your job as a living human being to go out of your way to control the flow of souls. It can be the job of those that it belongs to. That's not to say I think you should be selfish, far from it. There aren't enough people here that can do anything proper with lingering souls."

He shrugs again, bending for his hat and dusting the top of it off with one palm, eyes drifting away from Dean. "Know when to walk away, before you start becoming a ghost yourself, if you take my meaning. Maybe I'm telling you something you already know, Winchester-san, but people who live in this world and deal in that one are walking a thin line. To be forced to live life as a dead man is still a better sentence than to have only death as a living one."

Dean nods, relaxing minutely. "I got somebody to live for." As long as he's around, Dean will be able to walk away when he needs to. He just needs to keep him alive.

The chain clinks when Dean moves, and Dean grits his teeth against it, trying to stay as still as possible. "Is that what happened to you?" he asks. "Why you don't hunt anymore?"

"No," Kisuke answers, hat still clutched in one hand, halfway to his head as he lowers it again, a wry smile spreading across pale features, washed out in the light without the shadow usually planted over them. Tired gray eyes beneath heavy lids, framed with thick hair.

"That was never really my vocation. And at any rate, I no longer deserve to wear that uniform. I was exiled from that place. For the last one-hundred and sixteen years. For the crimes of illegal research, the use of forbidden spells, and the deception and injury of my fellows. For my crimes, I was banished to the living world indefinitely."

With a list of crimes that long and presumably serious, Dean wonders that the punishment hadn't been worse, though not even he is brusque enough to say so.

Instead, he's quiet. Dean's been mindful of Kisuke's skills since he met him, wary certainly, but interested in their use. Perhaps it's overdue, but in knowing what Kisuke's faced and what he still chooses to do in spite of it, Dean feels a budding respect for the man himself, rather than simply what Kisuke can do.

"Better in the land of the living anyway," he finally grunts.

The hat gets placed back into its given spot on top of his head, and Kisuke reaches for his coat next, sliding an arm through one wide sleeve and then the other before hooking the cane he carried over his wrist and moving back toward Dean, glancing over one of his broad shoulders to his body behind him. He can practically feel the anxiousness coming off him in waves; he doesn't like being so out in the open in that state, as a bare soul.

"Maybe you're right," Kisuke agrees evenly. "The world of the living moves at a different pace. It accepts things more easily. It's open to more change. Change doesn't come often or easily to the place that Kuchiki-san and myself came from. There aren't many progressive minds to be found. Only plenty of rules. It's no place for a person like myself. Someone who treats a rule as the demon of a small mind. No place for someone unafraid of getting their hands dirty. In the end, it was for the better. And anyway,"

He offers Dean a brief, bright smile, before placing a flat palm against his abdomen, thrusting him down and backward with a bang, reuniting psyche and soma.

"There's something to be said for vacation in Hawai'i in the middle of winter."

Dean's mouth is still open when he's pushed ass over teakettle back into his body. Once fully seated in his own flesh, the first thing he does is look around, eagerness feeding the false hope that there might already be a sword waiting for him. Of course, there isn't, and Dean tries not to look too foolishly disappointed when he sits up.

"You're a hard guy to have a conversation with," he says once on his feet. "You know?" Dusting the grass from his own behind, Dean cocks his head. "Now what? We're not done for the day, are we?"

"You've still got," Kisuke says, pulling back his sleeve and holding out a hand with two fingers extended. "Two more steps before you reach the finish line. For today, I'm almost done annoying you, but not quite. You're right on that front."

Reaching into the pocket of his pants, he fishes for what he's looking for, until he feels it, slick and cool. Pulling it out, he holds it up to the light, looking very much like a hollow, glass marble, though that's not what it is.

"But I know. That I'm not an easy man to talk to. To understand. Or to get along with. But you have my thanks for at least trying to deal with such an unpleasant person."

Tapping the length of his cane against his thigh with his free hand, he steps closer, keeping the object in his fingers in plain view. "This is a shell. This is what you're going to forge your blade out of, Winchester-san. But right now it's empty. It's got no spiritual matter or energy inside of it. It has neither form nor power, that's up to you to provide. But in order for it to start gathering those things, it needs a seed. You have a normal human soul, so you don't have a lot of options. You need a scrap of something foreign. I'm always an option, or Kuchiki-san, but you've also got--"

Kisuke lifts a hand, resting it against one of Dean's shoulders. "Something going on over here that might be useful."

Dean blanches slightly. Stuck in any given space with another person, Dean expects to be the unpleasant one - it's weird to hear Kisuke claim that title, and it has Dean shuffling his feet.

"Not unpleasant," he murmurs, "Just not easy." But Kisuke is touching his shoulder, Castiel's mark long healed but livid beneath his sleeve, and Dean regains his focus. "Remnant of angelic grace," he says. One from a fitting donor, given Dean's new determination to empower himself. "Will that work?"

Gray eyes shuffle from the shoulder under his fingers to Dean's own in surprised assessment, thin brows drifting up a pale forehead beneath the shadow of his hat. He ddoesn't hear a charitable opinion often from those he works with. It's far from the trust that Kurosaki-san had eventually placed in him, but it's enough to make him, for a second, think of home.

"That should work fine," he says, lifting his hand away just far enough to glow with dull, reddish light, before an answering light snaked out of the body below it, writhing in the air like a ribbon on a breeze before Kisuke plucked it away like so much gauzey, silvery spider-web.

In a moment, it started to disappear into the marble-like orb, which shone faintly, even in the light of day in the cavern beneath his shop. A pretty little thing, Kisuke thought.

"Hold for a minute," he told Dean, sticking his hand with the shell in it out to him. "It would be simple and clean if that was that, but that shell is going to have to go inside you. I'm going to place it in your soul. It's going to be a little uncomfortable."

Without worrying about permission, Kisuke was already clearly working on the spell to do the placing, folding back one of his sleeves completely to reveal a bare arm. He unsheathed the cane in his hands only far enough to reveal a length of blade to neatly knick the pad of his left thumb on, before closing it again, a few drops of blood landing neatly on the ground before he started scrawling the strange sigils necessary for the spell up the length of his right arm.

"The really fun stuff in life usually is."

Dean holds the shell in the palm of his hand, mesmerized by the faint glow until Kisuke begins to draw. It turns his stomach, not the blood, but the sigils, calling to mind more than one deal Dean's made in his life that's gone wrong.

"How's it get inside me?" he asks, already regretting his own curiosity. He'll find out soon enough, and it will likely be as uncomfortable as Kisuke says and more, but it's a favorable distraction from the blood.

Rather than actually answer Dean's question, Kisuke gives a snort of amusement. There's no reason to explain what's about to be readily illustrated. In the moment the last line is drawn, the characters light with the same faint red glow that had appeared before. They disappear in its wake, as if sinking down into the flesh beneath them, and Kisuke reaches for the little round object in Dean's palm.

He lifts his arm, which gives a soft crackle, like a doorknob touched in a too-dry room, before he thrusts his arm into Dean's chest to the elbow.

It sinks in neatly, as if the body in front of him weren't solid, was no more consequential than water. Leaving the shell behind where it needs to be, Kisuke pulls out and rests his hand at his side, mouth a thin line. But only for a second.

"The explanation would've only sounded like a double entendre anyway."

It's no worse than the discomfort that preceded it - pressure in Dean's chest, the shallowness of his breath over the panicked skitter of his heart. No worse, but for the presence of Kisuke's fist in his chest elbow deep.

Dean exhales in relief when it's over, clutching one hand to the spot, but of course his flesh is whole. And now that freaky glowing shell is inside of him.

"Hardly my soul's first fisting," he says, rubbing. "Feel free to hit me with the entendre next time."

Kisuke gives a snort at Dean's response, dropping his arm to his side and doing his best to disguise the clench of overstimulated muscles within the wide sleeve of his haori. Predictably, the spell he used to place the object inside of Dean had put his own synchronization out of order. It's painful, but shouldn't last more than a couple of days.

Certainly a fine cost to benefit ratio.

"I like you," he says. "You're cheekier than the last guy. Men who can take a joke are so much easier to work with. Although, maybe not as fun to tease." He narrows his eyes in feline amusement before moving off toward the ladder and peering up to the pinprick of light at the end of the dark tunnel above.

"We're done for now. Eventually, there will be other things we need to do. For the time being, just trust that time will do its work. If you have any weird side effects, come find me. I'd like to say there shouldn't be any ... but I've only actually done this five times before."

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all one-way sympathies

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