Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 28: Kitaro, Slade: Calculations

At a noodle stand near a park where the feral green parakeets were known to roost, Kitaro ate his bowl of udon slowly, watching one particular parakeet, the one with a green beak instead of the normal pink. He was beginning to think better of waiting a few days before collecting the kid and returning him to his friends. At least now he knew something about who the green-skinned human was, having charmed a local girl with a laptop computer into looking up 'green skinned American shapeshifter' for him. The first effort turned up a huge ogre-like man called 'the Hulk', but when he had her add 'animal' to the search terms, the computer produced the name 'Beast Boy', and a number of pictures.

So the kid was a 'super hero'. Well, humans had always produced a few among their number with yokai-like traits and abilities.

Back when Kitaro was a just-weaned cub, three hundred years ago or so, there had been two whole villages of them in Shiga prefecture, Iga and Koga. They called themselves Shinobi, which unfortunately was written with the same kanji as ninja, leading to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Ninja were perfectly ordinary, highly trained human guerilla fighters and intelligence agents. Shinobi had had superpowers—flight, imperceptibility, super speed—it was too bad the warlord Oda Nobunaga had all the families slaughtered, wiping out all the old bloodlines. Oh, maybe a few had survived, those out on missions, but not enough. The Shinobi were dead.

Yet now there were so many humans in the world, and people were less likely to burn, crucify, hang, or smother children who turned out to be a bit different, so these abilities were coming back.

All of that was neither here nor there. Kitaro popped a piece of fried sweet tofu into his mouth and chewed. His current problem was the freezing cold. Humans were sometimes tougher than a block of smoked, dried fish, and other times, they were as squishy as overripe bananas. The last thing he needed was for Beast Boy to get sick and die on him. He was going to have to get the kid out of the cold.

A plan began to form in his mind. He'd need help, some from his immediate family, so he'd have somewhere to take the kid once he collected him, but he'd need some help from other members of the yokai as well…

Draining the broth from his bowl, he paid and left the noodle stand. He had work to do.

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They wound up spending most of the day at the museum, having lunch in the café there and visiting the gift shops, where Rose found postcards, prints, and some fabric flowers on barrettes and hairsticks while Slade browsed among the books on more martial topics, finally choosing a handsome volume on the art of swordsmithing. He found Yukie in the selection of vintage kimono, holding one in hematite grey against herself and frowning in the way women did when they were trying to make up their minds about a garment.

"Go ahead and buy it. It has your name all over it," he advised her. Her name meant 'Snow', after all, and it was embellished with oversized snowflakes.

She smiled when she saw him. "I don't need another kimono," she said. "My grandmother left me several which are older and more valuable than these. I wore one only once in the last ten years, and that one also has a snow design. So I doubly don't need this one. Yet this one is quite different…All I would ever do with it is hang it on the wall as a decoration, perhaps."

"That one's meant for a married woman, correct?" He recalled what she had said about long, dangling sleeves versus those of practical length, and this one had sleeves of the practical sort.

"Or a woman who is willing to admit she is not in the first blush of youth anymore, at least," Yukie said, letting the fabric flow over her arm. "No. Beautiful as it is, no." She shook her head and put the garment back.