Immortal: Smoke

"Smoke"

Shizuru paused under an awning, reaching in her pocket for a cigarette. She put it in her mouth, inhaling smoke that wasn't coming through the filter. She hadn't had time to buy a lighter, but she wanted it there anyway. She could taste the tobacco on the paper, and smell it just a little bit, which was almost as good as lighting up and taking the first drag. She hefted her bags again and nodded to Yukina, who had politely paused just a few paces in front of her. "You feel that?" She asked, glancing up to the sky which looked - from here - deceptively clear and blue. Yukina nodded yes, matching pace with Shizuru again.

"It's unsettling," Yukina seemed to shiver as she spoke. Odd, Yukina shivering, as if she could feel cold. "I would swear it feels just like-"

"-Hey." Both women stopped short. Hiei had appeared (literally) in front of them, and held out his hands to take a bag from each. "Sky's getting nasty."

"What is this," Shizuru narrowed her eyes at him, "an escort? We're five blocks away, Hiei. We don't need our hands he-" a crack of thunder, and Yukina jumped, dropping one of the bags and spilling a jug of milk all over the sidewalk. Hiei cursed and grabbed it up, glaring up at the sky.

"We have to go," he growled, helping Yukina with the rest of her bags. He glared at Shizuru. "Emphasis on have to." The first few drops of rain splattered on the sidewalk, diluting the spilled milk into the gutter. Shizuru shrugged and handed over one of her bags.

"What's the status, then?" Yukina asked, quickening her pace to follow closely behind Hiei. "This wind, it feels like..."

"I know what it feels like," Hiei murmured. "There is going to be a storm soon, and we need to get to shelter quick." He stopped at a crosswalk, glaring hot death at the street sign. From this part of the street the wind was nothing more than completely normal, a little rustle.

Then someone turned on a strobe light. A hundred bright flashes one after the other, then a crack, like a thousand panes of glass breaking all at once. Behind them someone screamed, and Hiei realized that a thousand panes of glass had just broken, and were spilling their shards down onto the street with the rain. He dropped his bags, looking up and jumping back, Yukina in one arm, Shizuru in the other, staring with a kind of fascinated horror at an office building that had just decided to bend over and take a closer look at the street. He smelled fire and ozone; saw - in that split second of noticing that you can rewind and review a thousand times many hours later - where the building had been so scorched by lightning that it was folding in on itself. And he saw, or rather was sure he imagined, a gigantic bird rise up from the roof of the building and speed off into the distance. Hiei noticed all these things, but he did not register them. All he registered now was 'threat,' 'danger,' and 'move.' Preferably with 'protect' stuck on there somewhere.

Shizuru was not screaming; this was something that registered. She was yelling, something that sounded like "run away you stupid assholes!" or close enough to be relevant. Yukina had clapped her hands over her ears and was trying hard to make herself as small and unobtrusive as possible, letting Hiei carry her like a rag doll. Good girls, he thought, speeding away from the danger. Very good. Humans in the street were panicking, some running towards the falling building - he heard a smash, different from before, and knew that the first building had hit the one across from it - some running away. He dodged who he could, jumped over who he couldn't, and kept going. The strobe lights came again, and he was suddenly drenched. Rain? He hazarded a glance upwards. Water reservoir from one of the buildings, one he was past now, also bowing down to the street. The sky here was still clear. He didn't dare look behind him to see what it was like back there - he could feel the shadow of the clouds heavy on the back of his neck.

"UNDERGROUND!" Shizuru yelled; it took him a second to notice it was directed at him and not at someone on the street.

"WHAT?!" He shouted back, dodging a group of confused high-school kids. Some of them had their cell phones out, blithely taking pictures of the wreckage. He wondered if they even noticed him, running off with a woman under each arm. It must look absurd.

WE HAVE TO GET UNDERGROUND!" Shizuru answered him. She pointed and he followed the line of her finger instinctively, towards a set of stairs that looked like they were going down into the street. The humans that had enough of their wits about them to get off the street were heading to the same place. Fortunately, there weren't that many of them. He didn't slow down, taking the stairs five at a time, jumping over the turnstiles (careful, very careful, not to let either Yukina or Shizuru get caught or hit by anything) and stopped, not nearly out of breath but breathing heavily anyway. Humans were still piling down the stairs, screaming, turning, pointing... and smoke began to follow them. Or he thought it was smoke. It tasted like dirt, probably a mixture of both, and then the lights went out completely.

Kuronue had resigned himself to waiting. A few crows had returned with little intelligence - there were other Tengu in the city (as well as plenty of other demons, surprisingly high-level ones) most of them living mundane, human lives. None of his new flock had any information on Tadashi yet, but they'd only covered a small part of the city. He'd need a much bigger flock, he soon realized, but that would be impossible - or at least foolish - until he could find a secure base of operations and a large place to keep all of them, not to mention the birds themselves. He suspected that Tadashi already had a flock of his own, surely several times larger than his own, keeping eyes on his territory.

Tadashi probably knew where he was right now, or could make an educated guess. He'd been an idiot to leave that human's home.

That human... Kuronue could see the building the human lived in from here. He had flown circuit around a large bit of the city, yes, but that circuit ended not far at all from where he had woken up - less than half a mile. He peered at the building as he waited and the hours crawled by. Once, he saw a woman on the balcony he was sure he'd flown from, but she vanished soon after. Since then, nothing. He hadn't bothered to count the hours as they passed, but the sun would be very near the horizon by now, if he could see it beyond the dark cover of the clouds.

The storm took his attention now. The clouds had gone from bluish-grey earlier in the morning to near black now. Lamps on the street and in the buildings had already been lit, even though it was a summer day and the night should still be far from human was an uncanny familiarity to the storm - comforting, but also in some way repulsive for reasons he couldn't understand. He supposed his mind was still slow from his imprisionment, still quiet. It must have been, if his only plan now was to linger on rooftops. Lightning flashed, followed by an unnaturally loud crack of lightning, and his chain of thought was broken. He glanced again at the building he'd come from, and could see the demon from earlier, as well as another human, standing on the balcony, staring out at the storm. The demon's face turned towards him and he ducked around the housing of the exit stairs, keeping out of sight. He waited a moment before going to the edge of the roof again, looking out at the storm. That thunder was too loud to be natural...

The little hairs all over his body suddenly prickled and stood on end, and he felt like he was being lifted by the spine, and the world went bright white. Smoke, fire, lightning... He gasped, and his balance failed, the roof beneath him suddenly buckling, slipping down and away and hitting his back, though he hadn't fallen.

The building... what? No, what? What... FLY, you fool! He gathered his legs under him, bracing his hands on what had seconds ago been the floor and was now a wall, and pushed himself up and away, out into the sky as the smoke and fire decided that lightning was having too much fun and it was their turn to be very known. His back felt hot, a literal wave of heat pushing the backs of his wings and he tumbled in mid-air, arms flailing and wings flapping wildly to catch and ride that heat. Then, up, into the sky, surfing on the fire that was bursting from every pore of the building. The buildings next to it. The whole street. Smoke, lightning, screaming, burning everything. He cupped his wings and went up further, grabbing the air with his hands as if the motion itself would make him climb faster. He rose up quickly, the heat pushing him towards the clouds which had not too long ago been so inviting, and were now the last place he wanted to be. The rain hit him, driving him down, and he closed his wings, allowing himself to fall, dropping back down towards the street, towards the building the strange human and the fire demon had taken him to, then up towards the balcony and, he hoped, safety.

It wasn't the thunder directly that woke Kurama, but Misa. The cat, terrified by the last crash, had jumped onto the bed (and him) and had seemed to grow about ten extra legs, all of them ending in sharp kitty claws that were trying very hard to hide inside Kurama. The pain shocked him awake, and he fell out of the bed entirely, warring with self preservation (throw the cat off) and protective instinct (calm the cat down and make sure she isn't hurt) and settled for landing on his back, injured arm around Misa, looking around wildly for whatever the hell it was that had scared her so badly. It didn't take long for him to figure it out - a flash of lightning followed by a crack of thunder that sounded like an explosion let him know just what had put his cat in a foul mood.

He picked himself up from the floor, cradling Misa in his arms and trying to soothe her the best he could. Another flash, and he heard cursing over the next blast of thunder. Kuwabara.

"What the hell is happening out there?" He called, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and going out into the main room. Kuwabara was on the balcony, cursing loudly. "Kazuma! What's going on?"

"Oh, fuck, oh, Kurama, oh shit, look-" Kuwabara ran into the living room and grabbed Kurama's arm, making him drop the cat and dragging him out to the balcony, pointing and gesturing wildly. "Oh fuck, it's taking out whole blocks." Kurama went out with him, staring first at the storm - "Jesus, it's like that shit storm in Poltergeist," Kuwabara was saying next to him, hands in his hair, staring in horror down at the chaos in the street. Kurama stared with him, shocked now harder than he had been before. So many things happening all at once... god, what had happened down there...

"Kazuma," Kurama said, feeling like the air had been sucked right out of his lungs. "Where is everyone else?" Kuwabara stared at him, panicked.

"Sis and Yukina went to get food, Hiei went after them." He didn't point, but his eyes kept going to that particular block, to those buildings. One of them was a grocery store, a Mycal. A commercial advertising the store itself flashed through Kurama's head. His blood felt icy.

"When did he go?" Still, breathless. The clouds were roiling, the lightning striking at buildings with abandon, but none of it so destructive as the flashes that had taken out the Mycal and the office buildings next to it. Still, the air up here was deathly still. The storm was so close, a breath away from... there.

Thunder bellowed and the windows rattled. Distantly Kurama could hear Misa yowling pitifully inside. Rain and wind struck them like a slap, and Kurama thought for a horrifying moment that Kuwabara would go over the railing of the balcony and reached, grabbing his shirt and pulling him back. Kuwabara teetered backwards and slammed into him, pushing them both back into the apartment, spluttering and cursing and apologizing the entire time.

"Oh shit, Kurama, it feels like you," He gasped, slamming the balcony door closed. Kurama gaped at him.

"What do you mean, it 'feels like me'?" He asked, quite sure he already knew the answer. Kuwabara was spared from answering; a black mass of feathers and hair crashed through the balcony door, sent Kuwabara sprawling, and landed on the coffee table, snapping it in half. Kurama tried to go to it instantly, jumping to his feet and managing only to to trip over debris and narrowly avoid filleting himself on broken glass. "Kuronue," he gasped out, almost inaudible over another crack of thunder, then silenced completely as all the lights went out.

Kuronue followed close behind Akira, who was still talking a mile a minute about their battle plans. Tadashi had excused himself to go make sure his older sons were ready for the march. It would only be a few hours before they left, Akira told him, they'd planned it to arrive at the edge of Youko's territory at dawn with a force in the thousands.

"Father's called in a lot of favors with this one, and Youko isn't terribly known for making more allies than enemies, so we have a distinct edge this time." Akira was obviously excited. He and Kuronue were too young to have been in any interesting battles, mainly the odd border skirmish or similar easy march. They 'built character,' Sōjōbō had told them when they complained (for various reasons.) Kuronue was in a similar mindframe as Akira; the little battles they'd taken part in were less than thrilling. If they'd settled in Makai, they'd both probably be close to B-class demons. As it happened, Sōjōbō had forbidden them from even mentioning going to Makai. Kuronue had been waiting to go to war for years. Now, he felt like he was being bled out slowly by thousands of needles. Dread, cold and heavy, had settled itself in his stomach and was making it just a little harder to breathe.

"I don't see how it'll be any different from last time..." Gods above, he sounded like a coward. "I mean, when he can set the whole forest after us with a thought..."

"Aha! Yes, that's part of father's genius. You recall that lovely maiden you were supposed to be a suitor for last year? Well, she got married off to Tadashi's oldest instead. Turns out her father has a whole platoon of fire demons at his beck and call. We'll burn Youko out first, and with all his weapons being destroyed faster than he can grow them, we'll be able to overpower him. Maybe even take him in alive... he has something or other that father really wants to get his hands on."

Fire? How strong is he against fire? Kuronue didn't recall any back doors deeper in Youko's home (he'd explored as much of it as he could when Youko had been doped to the gills on painkillers) for all that it was built right into the side of the mountain. Maybe there was something he missed, some way he could escape...

"We're going to have to get you re-fitted for armor, brother," Akira sighed, stopping in front of the armory doors and giving him a once-over. "You look a lot thinner."

"Tracking through the wilderness isn't exactly a sedentiary lifestyle," Kuronue mumbled back. Akira seemed to accept that explanation and grinned brightly at him.

"Damn, but I was worried about you," Akira sighed, opening the doors to the armory. "There were a lot of rumors flying around... I'm not even going to go into them, they were absurd." He closed the door behind them, and barred it. His voice suddenly had a strange, airy quality to it. "Like, you working with Youko."

Kuronue tensed. Shit. How? Akira had found out somehow; he was terrible at keeping someone's secret when that someone was in the same room. Looking at him now, Kuronue could see it all over his face. He knew. Kuronue said nothing. He couldn't defend himself, of course, and Akira wouldn't believe him if he tried.

"You know, you aren't the only one who likes to get out once in a while. Tadashi sticks pretty close to father, but... you know how it is. He's the first born. We have more freedom." Akira folded his arms over his chest. His lips were pressed into a straight line, and his eyes were darting around the room, landing everywhere but Kuronue's face. "Father knows."

"WHAT?" Kuronue actually jumped that time. He had been shocked earlier, yes, but this rattled him down to his very bones. "Wha- but, if he knew..."

"You would've been taken in the assault with Youko. I know. You're officially a traitor."

The silence between them was like lead weight. Kuronue couldn't bring himself to say anything to Akira, as shocked as he was. Akira was still making a great effort to not look at him. It took him a long stretch of moments before he could force words. "If you knew that I was a traitor-"

"Tadashi knows too." Akira interrupted, gaze falling to the floor.

Kuronue closed his eyes. His father would know where he was, then, probably coming with armed guard. He had never in his life, not even after the worst of his childhood mistakes, felt like more of a fuck-up than now. He could run, surely, but of course they would've planned for that. He'd be stuck full of charmed arrows before he could get three wingbeats out the door.

"I'm good at spying, Kuro," Akira said, hands dropping to his sides. "And Tadashi is good at keeping people stalled with things while something important happens elsewhere. Father's in his stateroom on the other side of the manse, and Tadashi has father's personal samurai occupied with a disciplinary display in the second courtyard. If you run and fly fast enough, you can make it back to Youko's territory before dawn. If you're very fast..." he trailed off. Kuronue could swear he saw tears in his brother's eyes. "I won't give you anything, because I can't guarantee something I give you won't be tracked. But I can give you advice." He stood up a little straighter suddenly, and looked Kuronue in the eyes.

"Go to Makai. Take what you can carry or can't afford to leave behind and bury the rest. They don't know that Youko's treasury is in the mountain, and I won't tell you how I know. Father won't follow you there; he's too afraid of the stronger Tengu to want to try and go after you." He opened the latch to the door, glancing out before stepping aside. Kuronue could see the sunset through the lattice doors on the other side of the hall. "You know what the battle strategy is. And I'm sure he knows how to get to Makai." Kuronue stepped forward, unsure of what to do or say.

"Akira..."

"Go on. I'm useless at goodbyes, and I'm sure we'll see each other again." With that, Akira turned his back on him, eyes gleaming in the red sunset, and Kuronue fled from his home for the last time.

Kuwabara had made a soggy, half-hearted attempt at cleaning up the glass and getting the balcony doors blocked off to ward out the rain. There were second doors like shutters that went over them, but the frame of one had been dented by Kuronue, so didn't close all the way. Even so, it was better than nothing, and there was only a little puddle of rain coming through, which Kuwabara would mop up every few minutes in a desperate bid to keep busy. Kurama evidently noticed that it would be useless to tell him not to, and it kept him from wandering around aimlessly and worrying about Yukina and his sister.

Kurama was on the couch, and Kuronue - again comatose and completely passed out - was laying with his head on Kurama's lap, sprawled over two thirds of the couch with his legs dangling over the edge. His wings had been folded out of the way in the most comfortable way possible and were more or less intact, as far as could be told. Kuwabara and Kurama together had made some effort to patch up the bits of him that had been sliced by broken glass, but without more than a flashlight with a fading battery and a few dying candles there hadn't been much they could do.

Very little time had actually passed for all that; less than an hour. The electricity had gone out - in this building and as far as either Kurama or Kuwabara could see - save for the emergency lights in the bathroom, kitchen, and the hallways of the apartment building. In the very far distance there was a glimmer of lights, indicating that while the blackout was widespread, it was by no means complete. The only sources of light were from cars on the streets, emergency lights in the buildings, and the fires that had sprung up in the wake of the storm. Kuwabara, standing at the windows, could see little fires all along his line of sight, grimly aware that not all of them were due to the lightning. There were emergency sirens in the distance; they'd began to sound as soon as the lightning had stopped. Not long after, the sun had gone down completely. The sirens were still going now, with the closer cacophony of police and emergency vehicle sirens all but drowning out their distant drone.

The cell phones, along with anything not battery-powered, were completely down. Kuwabara had tried his phone and Kurama's, getting nothing but an automated message of a calm-voiced woman telling him that the cellular network was being compromised by emergency response, and that if he would please wait, service would be returned to normal promptly. Promptly didn't mean anything to Kuwabara unless prompt equalled immediate and that certainly wasn't the case right now. Yukina and Shizuru were out there, somewhere. For all he knew they had still been in Mycal when the lightning had struck it. When the cell phones failed, he had tried stretching out his awareness, and succeeded in only touching the echoes of confused and terrified spirits (thankfully none of them he recognized, yet) and a massive uprising of terror from every direction. Even after years of training and honing the ability, it was impossible to 'see' through the fog of panic that had settled with the storm clouds over the dark part of the city.

Kuwabara sighed heavily and tore himself away from the windows. He sat in the one chair that hadn't been soaked or sliced, resting his feet on a broken half of Kurama's coffee table. Kurama watched him, eyes reflecting the weak candlelight around them. The silence of the place was unsettling along with the darkness. The weak fluorescent glow from over the stove didn't quite ease the darkness - instead making it more obvious. The candles they'd managed to scavenge from around the apartment were even weaker, fluttering and threatening to extinguish at every breath of air from the broken doors. Kuwabara couldn't wait for sunrise, and wouldn't admit out out that the dark was more than just a little spooky. The silence, though, that could be taken care of.

"Think Botan's busy?" He asked, not expecting much of an answer.

"I hope she isn't," Kurama murmured. "Because if she is it means that she'd be ferrying someone we know. That's always how things like this work." Kurama's eyes closed a moment, and then half-opened again. "This has all gone very badly very quickly."

Kuwabara nodded slowly. He glanced then to Kuronue, who looked deceptively peaceful. The demon was still asleep, at least. He'd hit the glass awfully hard, and the table was one of those sturdy numbers that came with the apartment; meant to last. Poor guy... he may have treated Kurama like an asshole earlier, but he'd obviously been through a load of shit Kuwabara couldn't even imagine. "Kurama-" he started, but Kurama looked up sharply and held up a hand.

"Shuuichi. He can't know who I am, Kazuma. He means to kill Youko Kurama, and..." he trailed off again, his voice fading into the dull drone of the emergency sirens.

Kuwabara noticed Kurama was running his fingers absently through Kuronue's hair. A lover's touch, and it would've been sweet if Kurama didn't look so... horribly pained. "Shuuichi," he amended, folding his hands in his lap. It felt odd, calling Kurama by his human name. He'd done it before, of course, at Kurama's mother's wedding, and around school and work, but in private, among friends? There was a strangeness to it, like he was talking to a ghost. "Is..." he sighed heavily. That had gotten him off track. "God damn it, I forgot what I was going to say." Kurama chuckled weakly. As if in response, Kuronue groaned and put a hand to his head. Kurama instantly took his away, looking down at Kuronue with a look of mingled relief and fear.

"Oh, when did glass get so hard..." Kuronue moaned, covering his face with both hands now.

"I think it was the table that did you in," Kurama supplied, his voice sounding strained. Kuwabara snorted and barely suppressed a laugh.

Kuronue took his hands away from his face and looked around. "Good thing I got the right window," he murmured. Then he noticed the damage and cursed. "Seems the day isn't being very kind to either of us," he said to Kurama, offering a smile that could have been apologetic. Kurama sort-of smiled back, and Kuwabara kept himself in his chair, repressing the urge to jump up and shake Kuronue, maybe slap him a few times for all the trouble he'd put everyone through. Maybe beat the Tengu back into a coma. But then Kurama would probably kill him (regardless of power loss) and that wouldn't make things any easier for anyone. But the urge was there, and he entertained himself with a little mental fantasy of doing just that for a few minutes.

Kuronue pushed himself up, shoving long hanks of hair out of his face and over his shoulders. Kuwabara could see that, at some point, Kuronue had made an attempt to bind it up and out of the way, but whatever he had used had come undone in all the excitement, and the hair was now trailing on the floor like the train of a dress. Kuronue surveyed the damage, grimacing either in pain, embarrassment, or both. Most likely both. "I am... very sorry for this," he said to Kurama, who waved the apology away.

"The damage is fixable." Kurama made no overture to say anything else, and an awkward silence overtook them. They were all quiet, forming a lopsided triangle in the living room, staring at one another as if expecting something to happen. When nothing did, Kuwabara decided it was time, perhaps, to break the ice a little bit.

"D'you have a radio, Shuuichi?" He asked, almost laughing when the sound of his voice made both demons jump. He relized, belatedly, that Kuronue wouldn't have known Kurama's name. He realized also that they had both forgotten - at least for a moment - that he was in the room. Kurama looked at him blankly for a moment, and then it dawned on him.

"Yes, for emergencies. I'll go find it." Kurama stood, glanced at Kuronue, and then took the route that gave him the widest berth from the tall demon back into his room, grabbing one of the candles on the way. Kuronue watched him go and Kuwabara watched Kuronue.

"I don't think," Kuwabara said, after he was sure Kurama couldn't hear either of them, "that you made a very good first impression." He expected a glare, maybe even an attack from Kuronue at that bold a statement, but all he got in return was a soft, almost sad kind of sigh, and Kuronue shaking his head.

"No," the demon answered, eyes still on the hall Kurama had disappeared into, "I don't think I did."

Hiei heard his name in the darkness, and realized Shizuru had been talking to him for a full minute before the immediate intensity of threat had faded away and that animal part of his mind had gone somewhere else.

"What?" He sounded to his own ears more startled than he should have. The murmur of human voices closest to him stopped a moment, and he could see the ghostly faces of the humans who had also taken refuge here turn towards him, though they could not see him in the dark. He sneered at them, receiving blank, unseeing stares. He was just another shadow to them. Softer, this time, "What, Shizuru?"

"I need a light."

"What?"

"You have a lighter. I need it."

Oh, haha, he thought irritably, but conceded. Covertly, he flicked his fingers at her and the end of her cigarette flared to life. A few voices grumbled, but silenced after a moment.

The underground was silent as a grave. Every so often there would be a sneeze or a cough, the odd child crying, but otherwise it was still, with only the stirring of air and the shuffle of feet to be heard. Outside there was the occasional rumble of thunder, the sound of yelling or screaming, and the whine of sirens. The light that had filtered through the dirt and smoke had faded half an hour's time ago, bringing with it an eeriness he wasn't used to at all. The silence of the place, the blank bovine stares of the humans surrounding him, creeped him out more than anything else. Yukina, to his right, leaned over so she could whisper to him.

"When do you think we can get out of here?" She asked. He could see that she was starting to look uneasy, the veneer of compassionate calm was starting to crack. He shrugged.

"In a few minutes... the rain's starting to die down," he whispered back. He glanced around again, and the humans were still standing, staring around blankly. Waiting, it seemed, for someone else to come down and take controll of the situation. Even the security officers he had spotted had done little but tend to the few panicked or injured humans in the area, quickly quieting them down. They could be dying, but as long as they were quiet, it was no problem.

Another minute, two, and he decided he'd had enough of it, that the silence was just a little too much, maybe it was time to get going. A blinding light in his face and the roar of radio feedback in his ears prevented him from making that decision. Almost out of nowhere, the blue-red lights of police and emergency sirens sprang to life, like someone had hit the volume button on a television all the way up to the max. He flinched, cursing the reaction even as it happened, and stepped back, groping with either hand for his companions. Yukina's hand met him easily. It took work to get to Shizuru, who kept pulling away. He didn't look, but he was sure she was glaring - either at him or the police officers descending the stairs to the underground.

For some reason, perhaps it was because he was so used to the quiet, or maybe it was just the acoustics of the place, or that the officer was wearing a kind of helmet or face mask, he couldn't discern one word coming out of the officer from another. Sometimes something would seem important, like orderly fashion and silent and emergency, but otherwise it was all muffled, all jumbled. Like perhaps the human in front of him wasn't really speaking at all. The hand he'd managed to anchor on to Shizuru's wrist left her and went without his bidding to the hem of his headband. He came close -desperately close - to pulling it away before Shizuru grabbed him and pulled his hand back into obedience. An icy chill entirely unrelated to the weather crawled up his spine, and he amazed himself by stepping aside so the officer - followed by a flock of others - could pass him by. The humans were already starting to form orderly lines, still silent. No questions, no protests.

The officer that had talked at Hiei faded into the crowd, followed by his team. All of them were dressed in emergency-response uniforms, black and armored like they expected trouble. They prowled through the lines of humans like wolves through trees, muttering to each other and themselves the same phrases. Now Hiei could hear them clearly. This is an emergency. Please stay silent and line up in an orderly fashion. Over and over. Yukina's grip tightened. He felt Shizuru blow a plume of acrid smoke over his head.

"We should get gone," Shizuru said under her breath. A spotlight beam swung to her face and she squinted, her features suddenly significantly less sane in the hard light. Another mumble from an officer. She sneered. The officer mumbled again, the same garbled phrase, and went back to stalking among the rows. Hiei nodded slowly and turned towards the stairs, where the flashing of police lights made a concert in the clouds of dust and smoke. Yukina went with him instantly, and he could see her glance back over her shoulder at the mute humans in the underground. Shizuru, admirably, did not turn back. Instead, she paced up, moving in front of them like a battering ram, parting the drifting smoke in front of them with her own breath, out into the dust-choked streets.