Jin's Story: Nexus

Author's note: FINALLY finished this! Jin was really giving me a hard time. I just couldn't pin him down, appropriately enough.

The italic lines are the first lines of William Yeats' The Second Coming, which I do not own, because they're too busy belonging to William Yeats.

Characters: Jin, Touya

Pairings: None

Continuity: English Anime

Summary: Jin likes to be at the center of everything…and the wind is at the center of Jin. Oneshot. Six Fighters.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre…

The wind is the center of it all.

It's at the core of his very being. The wind, the push and pull of cold air chasing hot, hot rising to avoid cold, cool and warm tendrils of air curling around each other and exchanging energy in the form of heat, the unadulterated movement that is the wind…it is his life.

He dances through all the moods of the wind, and each one is fully and completely him.

He is the gentle breeze that caresses the flowers of spring. Riding the barely-there air currents, he can float, barely moving, an arm's length above the ground.

He is the playful gust that steals your breath away, bubbling up like laughter from somewhere you can't identify before it's gone.

But most of all, he is the strong, joyful wind that carries him ever higher, allowing him to effortlessly defy gravity.

Jin loves to fly.

When he's flying, nothing else matters—all earthly concerns are no more than pinpricks on the distant ground. He loves the openness, the exhilaration, that wonderful sense of absolute freedom.

But what good is a sense of freedom if you're not actually free?

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The strict rules of secrecy and silence in the shinobi sect were stifling to the free-spirited wind demon. He developed a reputation as a troublemaker and a rebel, and he clashed repeatedly with Risho over pretty much everything.

Risho…he was like his element, hard and unyielding. Stubborn, too—have you ever tried to get a rock to see your point of view? It ain't easy.

And worse, Risho didn't think much of the wind.

He thought that true strength came from solidness and rigidity, thought that the wind was nothing, nothing but soft little eddies and gentle breezes, all bluster and no force.

He thought of Jin the same way.

He was a fool.

Jin was the wind, and the wind wasn't always exhilaration and joy.

Sometimes, the wind was pure destruction.

When that mood took him, Jin could be incredibly violent, all feral rage and devastation. He could become a tornado, both metaphorically and very much literally, destroying anything and everything in his path in a storm of destruction.

Fortunately for the world, Jin didn't much like that mood, and preferred to avoid it.

Sometimes he wondered why he didn't just leave, strike out on his own, and say to hell with the clan. Certainly there was no love lost between Jin and most of the members.

But still…he couldn't do that.

Because he only had one friend in the world, and he was here.

There was no way Touya would ever leave the ninja clan—he was far too loyal for that. And gregarious as Jin was, he didn't like the thought of being alone in the world.

So Jin stayed, enduring the vile airs of Risho and Bakken (Bakken's wasn't just emotionally unpleasant, it actually stank), and did his best to stay on top of the uplifting whirlwinds he favored.

The Dark Tournament made him happier than he had ever been in his life, and that was saying something.

When Jin blew off his concealing cloak in from of the crowd, he knew he would never put in on again. Win or lose, life or death, he would never, could never, go back to the way it had been.

When he fought Urameshi, it was a worthy challenge, a fair fight such as he hadn't had in a long time. It was actually fun, not like the sneaking around he'd had to do for so long. This was exhilaration and elation at its finest, and he never wanted it to stop.

And even when they lost…he found he didn't mind it that much.

Risho had gotten what was coming to him, and even though he hadn't gotten to deal it out himself, it still made his ears awfully pointy when he found out.

And…he didn't have to go back.

He didn't decide that—no, he simply discovered that he knew. If he had made that decision, it wasn't consciously.

Better yet, he found that Touya had independently come to the same realization—he wanted his light as much as Jin wanted his free skies.

And they made new friends!

Chu and Rinku were the first, the surviving members of the first group Team Urameshi had faced. So they had that in common—and all four of them were still there to cheer on their former enemies.

Suzuka and Shishiwakamaru were next. Indeed, without Jin's uncanny ability to make friends with pretty much anybody, the pair of vain teammates would never have been integrated into their slowly forming group. Still, their winds weren't unpleasant—Jin was good at reading people.

And so the oddly matched set of six became a close-knit set of friends, with Jin acting as the common center for all of them. He was the one who could read all of them, the one who could act as a mediator.

So when they separated after the tournament, each pair of survivors going their separate ways, it hit Jin hard.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…

He didn't want it to end.

Everything else in his life had had something he wanted to end, but this…this had been perfect for him.

He had finally felt like he was part of something like a family…and then it was gone.

Everything was falling apart. Where was he supposed to go? He'd already left the only home he could ever remember having, and there was no way back even if he wanted to return to that awful restraint.

The great swirling winds of change stopped carrying him up, and started dragging him downward instead.

He could feel the darkest form of the wind pulling at him, whispering at him, churning around him and slowly sucking him towards the desolate maw of the big black empty.

He didn't like that place.

He had to struggle to stay above it, trying with all his might not to get sucked into the swirling maelstrom of nothingness.

If he had been alone, he might have been pulled under.

But he wasn't.

He still had one friend by his side, one who knew what it meant to lose hope, and that was enough.

Touya had already been through his own dark time, so even though it didn't affect him the same way, he understood. His quiet presence acted as an anchor, keeping Jin as steady as possible.

Ice, like rock, is a stable element.

So they wandered demon world together, hiring themselves out for various tasks, much as they had spent their whole lives doing.

Really, Touya was the one who made sure they got hired. Jin completed the tasks he was assigned, but that was the limit of what he could bring himself to do.

It felt to him like they hadn't moved at all. What was the point of breaking free if they never did anything with it? It was just depressing.

And then Kurama found them.

"I'm looking for six fighters to join me in aiding Yomi of Gandara. Would you be interested?"

"What would it involve?" asked Touya, ever practical.

"It would involve several months of training under Genkai, and then acting as my personal team under Yomi's command." Kurama paused, and then continued. "I was hoping to recruit our allies from the Dark Tournament. Call it a gesture of goodwill, if you like."

Jin's ears perked up, elongating a little.

"Yer six new friends from th' Dark Tourney, ye say?"

"Yes, indeed. In fact, the other four have already agreed. You proved the hardest to track down, in true shinobi fashion."

Jin didn't give one whit for politics, though the idea of training to get stronger so that he could fight Urameshi again appealed to him.

But the prospect of having all his friends, his adopted family, back together again…

"Of course we'd be lovin' to come with ye!"

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

That was the beginning of the best.

They were all together again, first training under Genkai, and then fighting in the Makai.

Jin loved it.

He was finally in his element, in the best part of his element, filled with exhilaration about the future, overjoyed at the situation he found himself in.

The deal with Yomi didn't last that long, true, but that gave way to the Demon World Tournament, which was even more fun than the last one! The sense of sportsmanship was a breath of fresh air—hardly anyone even died, which was a rare thing in the Makai. Jin himself had come close, as had Touya and Shishiwakamaru, but they'd all pulled through, stronger than ever.

Even if they were fighting separately, they were still a team, best together.

And for the most part, they did stay together after that, like the great big dysfunctional family they had become. Jin made sure of that.

Of course he did.

He was their center, their nexus of communication.

And as long as their winds whirled around him, no matter how tough things got, he was at the eye of the storm.