Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yun was surprised at the faint knock at his door. It was late; he was lying down, reading by candlelight, and wore only a loose robe, which he tightened as he rose to meet his visitor.

It was Jin. He was dressed, but his hair was wet as if he had just come from the bath, and he looked pale.

"This is an unexpected pleasure," said Yun, raising an eyebrow. "Is something wrong?"

Jin stepped inside, and Yun slid the door shut behind him. Without meeting the other's eye, the younger hunter said, "Let me sleep here tonight."

Now both Yun's eyebrows went up. "Really," he said. "...Do you know what you're asking?"

"Yes."

"And that's what you want?"

Rather than speak, Jin only nodded. But his expression was grim, and he still refused to meet Yun's gaze.

"Sit down, please." Yun tied his hair back and joined the younger man on the futon. Carefully he brushed Jin's hair behind one ear so that he could see his friend's eyes. "Why are you really here, Taiga?"

Jin flinched slightly at his real name. Yun waited, all the while gently stroking the other's neck with his thumb. It was true that part of him wanted to accept the invitation at face value and have a little long-awaited fun, but the intellectual part of him couldn't allow him to accept a 'yes' that he knew wasn't genuine.

"I want to forget," the younger said at last. He glanced at Yun, then at the ground again. "You can make me forget. Everything. I'm sure of it."

Yun sighed heavily, pulled the other closer and wrapped his arms around him. "It's not that simple."

"Of course it is. Sex cleanses the mind, everyone says so."

"You don't know anything about it."

"I don't care. I need anything but what's running through my head right now. I'll let you do whatever you want. I know that you've been after this for years. We're friends, I trust you. I'm not saving myself for anyone, and your wife doesn't care. There's no reason not to."

"Jin. Listen to yourself." Yun pushed the other hunter out to arm's length and tried to force him to make eye contact, but Jin remained evasive. Yun frowned. "I know you too well to let you make a mistake like this. You don't want to do this because you want to have a good time, or because you like me, or because you feel like you're ready. You want it the way a drunk wants a bottle. You're looking for escape and you're not going to find it."

Jin cast a look at Yun sideways, his brows furrowing in anger. "Because you know me better than I do myself, do you?"

"You said it yourself: you want to forget. What is this really about? Speak to me as Hasham, not as Yun. Tell me what happened."

Jin shook his head, looking wretched. "Nothing different than any other assassination," he mumbled, his voice catching just enough for Yun to notice.

"Something must have been different or you wouldn't be reacting this way."

Instead of answering, Jin said, "I can't keep living like this, Hasham. I close my eyes and all I see is death and violence. I dream about it. I wake up in the morning dreading what the day might bring, and I go to bed at night hoping I won't wake up. I go home to that huge empty house and all I feel is absence. I killed a woman today who had her hair up in two little buns like Mayuna used to wear, and one of them came undone and she was lying there on the ground bleeding out and, by my ancestors, I swear I looked down and I saw Mayuna. The woman didn't look anything like her, besides her hair - but I couldn't see anything else. It freaked me out pretty bad. Either I saw a ghost or I was hallucinating, and I don't like either possibility."

"Have you been getting enough sleep lately?" Yun asked earnestly, but Jin replied with such a murderous-looking scowl that Yun didn't wait for a response. "Is that all that happened?" he coaxed.

The younger hunter pulled his knees closer to his chest. "I went to this pond where I used to go swimming with Touji. I don't know why; it wasn't on the way. I guess I was still shaken about what I'd seen. Touji and I used to have competitions to see who could hold their breath the longest, and I swam down to the bottom of the pond and decided to see how long I could stay down, just for fun. And I remembered that Suyou tried to drown me there, too, and how close I'd come to dying then, how easily, and..." He sighed heavily, wilting. "I don't want to die, Hasham. I know that I don't. It's just... I want to be twelve years old again, forever - I want to stop living before it all goes bad. I was thinking about that, and... and I stayed at the bottom of the pond for probably ten minutes, maybe even more."

"You were hoping you would drown."

"Yes."

"But you didn't, obviously."

"No." Jin gave a sort of bitter laugh. "I beat my record, so there's that. Didn't know I'd gotten so good."

Yun gripped the other's shoulder and turned Jin's face to his with one hand. "Are you all right?" he asked seriously.

The younger refused to meet the other's eye. "I'm not suicidal."

"I know that. But are you okay?"

"I would have thought you'd jump at the chance to finally fuck me."

"Stop," Yun snapped. "Just stop. I'm trying to help you and you're behaving like a child."

Jin looked at the ground and said nothing. Yun sighed heavily and sat back on the futon. "Let me help, Taiga," he said, his tone softening. "Please. Don't shut me out."

The other took a shaky breath. Yun could tell he was having a hard time keeping composure, so he waited, and a long silence passed before Jin finally spoke.

"How do you do it?" At last the younger hunter looked the older in the eye, his gaze pained and pleading. "How can you go home to your wife and pretend like everything's normal? How can you sleep without having nightmares? How can you joke about death the way you do? I keep waiting to be like you and Suyou and everyone else, but it never happens. I've been a Hunter for almost ten years, but here I am with more than a hundred kills, second in command, and I'm still thinking like a kid. I feel weak. It's like there's something wrong with me. How can I presume to take over for Orutoran-san if I can't even control my emotions?"

Yun hugged him, pressing his face into the other's neck and placing a gentle kiss there. "Perhaps that's why our leader picked you. There's no denying you're different from the rest of us, but I don't think that makes you weak. If it did you wouldn't have been able to get all those kills in the first place."

"You're just trying to make me feel better."

"I'm not. I do think your lack of self-control is a liability. This is a perfect example. You come to my room in the middle of the night asking me to make you 'forget', when you've never had anything even close to sex, knowing my predilections and knowing that you would undoubtedly hate the sort of thing I would do to you, yet still saying you'll let me do whatever I want, because you had a bad night and you'd rather be thinking about anything other than your conscience or whatever. That's terrible decision-making. And this sort of recklessness is all too typical of how you operate. Let's not even get into the way you act when Prince Chagum is involved - or Mon, for that matter. Your emotions don't make you weak, but they definitely make you stupid. However," he continued, "in some ways you seem to think things through more , and make better decisions, because of your emotional involvement in them. You want to keep the number of deaths to a minimum, so you plan your jobs to involve as much stealth and as few people as possible. You don't want to hurt civilians, so you find ways to get the job done that are fast and undetectible. And when someone needs rescue or protection, or when the target is someone you consider worthy of execution, you work ten times harder because you want to 'do the right thing'. I'm sure that our leader agrees with me on this point, and I'm also sure it was a major factor in your promotion. You're never sloppy about anything because you can't allow yourself to screw up or someone innocent could get hurt."

Jin didn't argue; he knew Yun was right about everything he'd said. "I just wish it wasn't so painful." He sounded small and miserable, and Yun could see then, not this tall young man with the cold expression and the whipcord muscles of a wolf, but the sad, adorable little boy who had first come to live here eight years earlier. Again he kissed his younger colleague, this time on the cheek, tenderly, like he might kiss his wife.

"I'll tell you why it's so easy for me," said Yun, moving to sit a little closer. "When I was six years old, my father gave me a rabbit. He told me that I had to care for that rabbit like it was my child - feed it, wash it, take it with me wherever I went. It slept in my bed with me, and I carried it around in my coat for months. It was a sweet little ball of fluff, and playing with that rabbit helped me deal with the difficulty of the training my father had started giving me the day after my sixth birthday. In my mind, I loved that rabbit more than my own siblings.

"When I'd had the rabbit almost a year, my father had me bring it to the woods with us one night, he handed me a knife, and he told me to kill it. I was shocked, horrified, angry, disbelieving. I wouldn't do it, so my father took the knife from me and cut the rabbit's paw off. It screamed and kept screaming; my father thrust the bloodsoaked knife at me and told me, again, to kill it. I almost couldn't do it. My hand shook so badly that I couldn't seem to hold the knife at all, and then I didn't have any strength behind my cut, so it just made the rabbit bleed and scream more. I wept like a baby til I couldn't even see what I was doing, and finally I just stabbed blindly at my beloved pet, again and again until it stopped screaming and my father took the knife and told me it was done.

"He said that I had to learn to commit - that if I had just cut the rabbit's head off right at the start, it wouldn't have suffered and I wouldn't have made such a godawful mess. At the time I thought he was furious with me, but I think it was probably just as hard for him to watch as it was for me to experience. It was terrible. I didn't sleep at all; I couldn't get the sound of the rabbit's cries out of my head, and I sobbed all night long.

"The next day my father gave me a new rabbit. I didn't want to take it. I knew the same thing would happen, I'd fall in love with the rabbit and then I'd have to kill it, and I couldn't stand the thought of having to do it again. But my father told me if I didn't take it, he would kill it himself, now, in some slow, gruesome fashion, and he would make me watch. So I took the damn rabbit and tried to raise it without getting attached. A year passed and I started to think maybe he'd forgotten. That's the logic of a kid, you know?" Yun stroked his colleague's hair absently as he spoke, occasionally continuing the touch from scalp to neck or a little further. His voice was contemplative and slightly sad, but even and mostly matter-of-fact, as was Yun's way. "It was inevitable, though. I thought I'd managed to not care about this one, but when my father told me to bring the rabbit to training, I got so upset I tried to run away and free the rabbit in the woods. Stupid thing wouldn't go. I'd cared for it from such a young age that it didn't know anything else, and it just hopped around in front of me like an idiot while I cried, and my father, who had followed me, came out of the woods and told me what I had to do.

"So I killed the rabbit, and it was just as terrible but I committed to it this time, and it went a lot faster. When my dad gave me a third one, I just accepted it without argument. He told me then that a Hunter's role was to be ready to kill anyone - or hurt them, or lie to them, or spy on them, or otherwise betray them - at a moment's notice, no matter how much I might care about them, no matter whether I knew or understood the reason for my orders or not. The rabbits were my father's way of acclimating me to that reality. When the time came to kill the third rabbit, I didn't hesitate or try to get out of it. I just did how I was ordered, and my father told me I had done well."

Jin looked up at him with horror and deep sympathy; he found Yun's hand and squeezed it. "I'm so sorry, Hasham," he said, and Yun knew he meant it - his friend's emotional state was always quite transparent in moments like this.

"I'm not," Yun said with a wry smile. "It was an important lesson, and one that you never had. That's why you struggle so much with your role as a Hunter. It's really too bad that you didn't have a similar initiation, honestly. You'd hate yourself a lot less if you had."

"I don't hate myself..."

"You absolutely do. In fact, I have a feeling that's what drove you here tonight, instead of to another's room. If you really, genuinely just wanted someone to get you off and make you forget about things, you'd have gone to someone nicer. Sun would probably have been happy to deflower you." Yun grinned at the thought of the most experienced and worldly of their number educating the least. "But you came here , because you know I'm not nice, that I'd hurt you and make you do things you didn't want. You wanted to punish yourself, but you managed to convince yourself you were after sex rather than just more misery. It's the same reason you train longer and harder than anyone else, and the same reason you haven't tried to find a wife yet. You hate yourself too much to allow yourself a little happiness, or even a rest. I wish you'd be kinder to yourself. Maybe if your father had been able to train you properly, you'd be more like the rest of us."

Jin slouched against his knees, looking even more sad and wretched than he had earlier. Yun hugged him and ruffled his hair. "Don't be so gloomy, Taiga. Someday you'll learn to forgive yourself." He gave the younger an affectionate kiss on the temple. " We all like you. So does the herbalist. Why, I think you've even managed to charm Master Shuga." He laughed a little when Jin made a face at this last remark; he knew the star reader hadn't made a good impression on the other Hunter.

Presently Jin extricated himself from Yun's embrace and got stiffly to his feet. "I should go," he said. "Thanks for talking me down."

"Wait a moment." Yun caught his arm. "Stay here tonight. Just sleep here, with me."

Jin frowned. "You said-"

"Yes, but that's not what I'm asking. I just think you could use some human contact."

The younger man looked bemused at this, but then he gave something that was almost a smile and said, "I think I'd like that." As he lay down and pulled the covers up, he turned halfway and said, with a quizzical, suspicious expression, "Why are you being so nice, Hasham?"

"I worry for you." Yun climbed under the blanket next to him. "All of us Hunters have a hard road to travel, but yours has been especially difficult. We all somehow decided, independently of each other, that we would look out for you, since... well, we're the only family you have."

"Pity?"

"Not at all. It's just that we all have people we can turn to for help and advice. You only have us. It's simple necessity."

Jin accepted this and started to turn away, but then he stopped and glanced back. "I'm not going to wake up with you doing something untoward to me, am I?"

Yun grinned. "Are you withdrawing your offer?"

"Yes. You talked me out of it."

"Good. It was a stupid offer to make in the first place. Consider your maidenhood secure."

The younger man laughed at this; he couldn't help it. "I really appreciate this, Hasham. You're very thoughtful sometimes." He rolled onto one side and tugged the blanket up to his neck. A moment later Yun pressed close against his back and draped an arm over him almost protectively. It was a strange sensation, being this close to another person. He tried to remember the last time he had slept in the same bed as someone else, and suddenly realised that it had been Touji, his little brother, who came to his room in the middle of the night a few months after their mother died, saying he was too scared to sleep in his room alone, that he needed Taiga to protect him from the monsters that lived in the darkness. Many times after that, Touji had returned, and it had always ended the same, with them both asleep in basically the same position as Jin and Yun now lay - except that the roles had been reversed. Now it was Taiga who needed protection from the monsters in the dark.

All at once he felt himself crumble. He clamped a hand over his mouth, but the gesture was useless; it would have been obvious to anyone that he was sobbing. Yun hugged him more tightly but didn't say anything, which Jin appreciated. Again he felt a swell of gratitude to the older hunter. Yun was complicated - he didn't have much patience for weakness, he had a strong sadistic streak and enjoyed violence, torture and, on the more mild side of things, teasing. But he also paid close attention to everything around him, and he was always the first to notice when something was wrong and to do something to remedy it. Jin knew that Yun would never let a word about this night escape to anyone, not even Mon. Then again, Mon would know all about it without being told, because Mon knew everything. But Mon wouldn't tell, either. So Jin let himself cry. He let himself be held and comforted, and eventually he fell asleep.