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sprinkler system just beyond the bushes. As he turned to follow the
source of the sound, his eyes focused upon a second building just a=20
stone's throw away from where he was standing. He walked towards the
unremarkable structure and, on his way to the flight of stairs leading=20
to its entrance, he caught sight of several doctors and nurses scurrying
and bustling about its cramped hallways, minding their own business.

The nearby hospital was a small-sized building, about five stories high
and only a little larger than an average mansion. It sat contentedly
wedged between a school and a residential area, in one of the quieter
and more peaceful parts of Tokyo.=20

As Kurama ventured further, he quickly realized that he was currently
walking on just one of the many small parks that dotted the area;
miniscule islands of greenery amongst the jungle of concrete. From this
new vantage point, he got a better view of the building he had spotted
earlier as it stood proudly in the distance, rising above the trees and
shrubbery with a splendor that could not be denied even from such a
remote proximity.

He conclusively deduced that he was in some sort of the botanical garden
located in the lobby of a local city hospital; but the problem was, he
had absolutely no idea what he was doing there or why Kuronue's pendant
brought him there in the first place. Was this really the place he
wanted to go to the most? He tried to remember the brief vision he had
before he vanished from his shared dream with Maya Kitajima, but by now
it had already become a distant and fading memory.

'Wait a minute!' His thin eyebrows furrowed as he looked down--beneath
his feet, he found an out-of-place marble road that led directly inside
the off-white health ward. The russet pathway stuck out like a sore
thumb amidst the ashen concrete and vinyl tiles of the hospital's floor,
yet it was by and large unnoticed by the preoccupied physicians.

'This is it; the road to another good-bye. That's where I need to go: my=20
questions can wait,' Kurama thought firmly as he shook off the sick
feeling in the pit of his stomach and moved forward.

But before he could even take his first step on the marble road, Kurama
was caught flatfooted by two hard, manly slaps from behind, one on each=20
shoulder. He nearly jumped up in surprise after he turned around and
discovered who was behind him.

Yusuke and Kuwabara--this time sporting their custom-made Sarayashiki
Junior High School uniforms--stupidly grinned at the half-youko as they
greeted in unison, "Yo, Kurama!"

"Where'd you guys come from?" Kurama gasped as he strove to steady
himself after his initial shock, his eyes nearly boggling at his fellow
Spirit Detectives. "I thought you'd already woken up by now! What are
you two still doing here in the Dream World?"

"Hey, relax, Kurama!" Yusuke cooed as he soothingly moved his hands up
and down in front of the kitsune. "If you're going to go through all
this trouble to say your good-byes to your loved ones, then why can't
we?"

Kurama tilted his head questioningly at the raven-haired young man.
"Yusuke! That's about the sweetest thing I've ever heard you say! You
must be coming down with something," he reckoned, chuckling gaily.
"Seriously though, thank you; I appreciate the sentiment."

"No problem," Yusuke sheepishly stated as he scratched his chin
ponderously. "To be honest, the only reason we're still here in this
crazy dream is to catch up with you before you did that thing you were
supposed to do with Munashii's chick, Asuka; if you can catch my drift,"
he managed to inform in one breath.

Kurama sweated bullets of sheer awkwardness upon hearing the half-
demon's unintentional double entendre, but otherwise quickly recovered=20
from the horrid misuse of the language. "Don't make it sound so sordid,
Yusuke."

"KURAMA!" Reacting like a matador would to a bull, the redheaded demon
fox involuntarily sidestepped a rather distraught Kuwabara as the
taller, brawnier adolescent shouted his name and lunged for him in a
disturbingly affectionate manner. The inexplicably weeping young man
missed him by a mile and tumbled into a boneless heap, knocking down
several garden gnomes in the process.

"Kuwabara-kun! You surprised me!" Kurama exclaimed as he went over the
disoriented, curly-haired youth and proceeded to help him up. "Why are
you...?"

With impressive ease, Kuwabara grabbed hold of Kurama's hand, flipped
forward, landed on his feet, and clutched him in a nigh-unbreakable,
bone-crushing bear hug.

"What you you're doing right now for the sake of a girl you've never
even met proves that, beyond the shadow of a doubt, you're a man among
men!" the robust teenager sobbed as masculine tears streamed down his
face. Meanwhile, the kitsune panted and huffed for dear life, apparently
forgetting that he was already, for the most part, dead.

"I'm going to miss you, you beautiful man, you!" Kuwabara openly wept
while the rictus smile plastered on the redhead's face widened in
furtive anguish. "I'll never forget you, Kurama! You're the manliest
man I've ever known; next to me, of course."

"Aw, cut that out, you big blubbering ox!" Yusuke casually coaxed as he
extricated two of his closest friends off of each other. "I do hope you
realize the irony of what you said, mister weeping willow."

"There are times when real men must cry," Kuwabara sniffled, nodding
sagely as Yusuke gave him an incredulous stare. "Don't give me that
look; I've seen you cry lots of times. Don't even try to deny it."

Kurama, after regaining his breath and composure, couldn't help but
shake his head at his companions' crazy antics in bemused amusement. Or
amused bemusement, whichever the case may be.

His mood suddenly shifting, Kuwabara added grimly, "Besides, don't
forget that what Kurama's planning is essentially suicide. He's about to
die so that he can give Matsui Asuka another chance to live; Munashii
himself told me about that."

The effect of the declaration was almost instantaneous; Kurama stared
imploringly at Yusuke, but the half-demon could not even look him in the
eye. Kuwabara, however, kept gazing at the both of them with an ardent,
almost defiant look. "Now if you can't cry about that, then I'll cry for
you, Urameshi. I'm man enough to take it."

Slightly vexed, Kurama trailed off, "Kuwabara-kun, look..."

"There's no need to explain yourself, Kurama. I know where you're coming
from," declared Kuwabara as he waved off the kitsune's concerns. "This
situation isn't any different from when I sacrificed myself to Toguro so
that Urameshi could unleash his true power. We all need to sacrifice
some things, even ourselves, for the good of the people we love, and I'm
not in the position to judge you and your decision."=20

After a moment's pause, Yusuke spoke. "The same thing goes for me,
Kurama. I didn't judge you when you thought you were becoming gay, and I
won't judge you for taking your life into your own hands. Your decisions
may seem controversial, but it's still your own business and none of
mine."

Uncharacteristically, the mazoku descendant's lower lip trembled and
teemed with unbridled grief. "But please, don't tell us not to be sad
about it. That's something we just couldn't help. We've been through far
too much not to care. Goddammit, Kurama, take care of yourself." He then
leaned forward and tightly embraced the surprised redhead.=20

Kurama's mouth twitched miserably as he gently let go of his flustered
comrade; he wasn't even sure if the halfhearted expression on his face
could still be called a smile. "I've had a good run, and I'm glad that
the both of you care so much, but I have to move on. And I can't blame
either of you for feeling sad, given that even my youko self doesn't
agree with my decision."

Yusuke snorted in morbid amusement. "I can imagine. Well, tell that
uppity youko self of yours to stick your decision up his ass, because
there ain't nothing he can do about it." The half-demon afterwards gave
the half-youko a laidback salute. "Hopefully, you'll be as lucky as I
was and live through this suicide of yours. Good luck on that, and say
hi to Asuka-chan for me."

Kurama chortled at Yusuke's dark sense of humor. "I guess that little
piece of wisdom is another one of your patented, Urameshi-style, no-
beating-around-the-bush rants."

"Damn straight," Yusuke replied, then added, "Even though Kuwabara here
had to beat the living hell out of me just so that I can 'accept' your
little 'death scene', I'm pretty sure there are still a lot of people
who'll do anything to keep you from fulfilling your promise to Matsui
Asuka. You still got to watch yourself, man."

"I know," Kurama confirmed. "And I'm ready for anything they've got."

"Attaboy," Yusuke rooted with a wan smile, then darted his eyes away
from the scarlet-haired ghost. "Once you put your mind into something,
there ain't no stopping you. But then again, the same could be said
about any of the four of us, right?"

Kurama blinked. "'Any of the four of us?' What do you...?" But by then,
Yusuke and Kuwabara already had their backs turned as they made their
way out of the misty garden, traveling in the opposite direction of the
road to autumn. And then they were simply gone. Sighing, Kurama again
opted to let his questions rest for the time being.

'After all, I do have far more urgent things to take care of,' he
reckoned as he began to reassess his bearings.

Kurama's eyes narrowed as he followed the incongruous road into the
looming hospital, as if he had just realized something. 'I've been here
before,' he thought as he sauntered into the wide, glass-door entrance.
Unaware of what was happening, his unaired queries had again sneaked
past the back of his mind and were now bursting through his overloaded
synapses. 'No wonder it looked so familiar. But when was I here? Why was
I here? Why am I here now?'

The kitsune soon found himself standing at one end of a very long
hallway with a highly polished vinyl floor marred only by the marble
road. The mundane, pea-soup ceiling was inlaid with fluorescent lights
lined up in a drearily symmetrical fashion. The walls on each side were
boarded with off-white panels, the same color as that of the exterior of
the hospice, and had countless identical doors whose only distinguishing
marks were the room numbers above them; they led into various
laboratories, clinics, and departments.

The artificial lighting made everything seem gloomy and bare, the simple
colors making it look like a prison or mortuary. The thought left Kurama
feeling rather disturbed. The hospital seemed to exude the atmosphere of
a place where someone would meet their doom rather than their salvation.

The half-youko shook his head and morbidly swallowed at the idea. What
he was looking for was on the fifth floor, judging from where the
marble road led. He glanced to either side of him and saw a list of
rooms embedded in the wall to his right. He quickly went over and
examined the directory, scanning through all of the room numbers and
descriptions for the building. After he found what he was looking for,
he turned and resumed his ostensible death march.

He tried to ignore the drifting, overpowering smell of disinfectant in
the air as he continued following the road to his next good-bye,
completely lost in thought. Every few seconds, a doctor or nurse would
emerge from one of the many doors from either side of him with a soft
'whoosh' while short queues of physicians lining up for the elevators
could be found at the other end of the sanitized labyrinth.=20

There was a fountain down the hall, just before the elevators. The
decorative construct seemed to epitomize the hospital's philosophy of
ideal proportion and hygienic purity with its bland yet balanced jets
of water going off consecutively in a monotonous rhythm. The perfectly=20
circular pool didn't even so much as waste a trickle of water as each
and every drop was accounted for by the perpetually tiresome
machinations of the overgrown adornment.

Meanwhile, Kurama continued to weave through the mass of faceless
humanity congregating in front of him, excusing himself profusely to not
only doctors and nurses, but patients, guards, and custodians as well.=20
Yet for some strange reason, not one of these people acknowledged his
presence; they all acted as if he wasn't even there.=20

Nevertheless, he patiently endured the swarming throng while wending his
way between hospital staff, some of whom were carrying clipboards,
others wheeling in their respective patients, still others idly reading=20
newspapers as they walked by. Like listless drones inside a bee hive.

Everything in the hospital felt so sterilized, homogenized, uniform, and=20
unvarying that it made even the usually imperturbable Kurama feel a bit
queasy. In spite of living in the Human World for nearly twenty years...
in Japan, in particular... he could never get used to these forced
values of communal monotony and harmonized homogeny. Groupthink, after
all, was a scary thing to witness, and even scarier to be a part of.

His vague sense of nostalgia and the marble road as his only guides,=20
Kurama persisted on treading through the crowd. He turned to his left,
just past the fountain, the elevators, and the rising tide of people;
there he found the stairs leading to the upper floor, and was relieved
to see that they were for the most part empty. He climbed the marble-
speckled staircase without a second thought. 'I'm almost there.'

Sooner rather than later, at the fifth floor to the right, the road of
marble ended where Kurama was supposed to be; where he wanted to be the
most. A single, coherent thought formed inside the redheaded spirit's
mind as he looked at the room number above the door. It was his moment
of clarity, his purest epiphany. 'Room Five-Oh-One... I remember now.'

Just beyond that door lay Shiori Minamino, and Kurama couldn't even
bring himself to open it.

In real life, room five-oh-one was actually the emergency room where
Kurama's--or rather, Shuichi Minamino's mother, Shiori, stayed during
the time when her health was in serious jeopardy. His mother's critical=20
condition and impending demise were what prompted the former Makai thief
to steal the Mirror of Forlorn Hope from the Spirit World. And now,
apparently, his mother was also dreaming the very same stressful and
traumatic memory.

But in this dream, the tables had turned. This time it was he who was
going to die, and he didn't quite know how to break the news to his
mother. More to the point, he wasn't really quite sure if he was
prepared to say his good-bye to Shiori at that instant. He had already
tried to leave her in the past, when he was just ten years old, but that
didn't pan out quite the way he had planned it.


***


To be Continued...

Next: Good-bye, mother; say hello to your new child.

Writing this chapter (while a hefty chunk of my writer's block is
still crushing my muse's frail, weak, and asthmatic body) is like
cactus-patch diving and warm beer; the former because it's
somewhat troublesome and unpleasant to bear, and the latter
because being able to enjoy such unnecessary punishment is an
acquired taste. But I digress. Long story short, what's done is
done. Enjoy the fruits of my labor if you so choose.

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), it'll be another long
wait before the next chapter. But you know what? I humbly believe
it'll be worth it.

Note that I put in the title _Shonen_ not _Shonen-Ai_. Shonen-Ai=20
(male-male relationship) and yaoi are just not my cup of tea. This=20
is dedicated to Chimamire Kitsune for giving me the inspiration to=20
write this fic. Wherever you are, this is for you.

Disclaimer: All characters used in this fanfic (save some others)=20
are the rightful property of Yoshihiro Togashi, Shueisha, Fuji TV
and St. Pierrot. Don't sue me please, I'm very poor.

Paalam!
Abdiel
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