AN: If Hiei were human, I imagine he'd be a soldier. Mera is my ever-present OC. Explanation for this fic is in end notes.
Chasing
The first time they meet, Mera is sixteen and she paints the frozen world onto her canvas as her chest is overrun with red.
In Mera's mind, she can see Hiei and herself standing close, one hand inconspicuously reaching for the other and though only their fingertips manage to graze, she clings on to that fraction of time. Mera desperately wants to redraw her soldier closer to the centre of her canvas, and she stretches quivering fingers skyward to connect his portrait briefly to the place where their hands could be joined, where their figures could be intertwined.
Sometimes Hiei looks at Mera and in spite of the old-soldier eyes staring back, he shakes his head at her and mutters to himself, too young.
She doesn't stand out in his squadron. Her limbs are no longer flimsy and weak; not as they were when he had first picked her out from the monotone crowd. Unlike them, she wasn't a meagre remnant doomed to die huddling within fragile walls. He's good at picking them out, the ones with strong spirits, the fierce eyes.
In the end it helps a little that she is on their side. Hiei enters the war again still injured as she draws enemy fire away from their cornered squadron, and he manages to cut down a couple more nameless figures with his favourite Shinto blade before something catches him in the gut, and then the chest. He regrets for a few moments. He watches Mera unblinkingly in the distance as the world seemed to converge towards her; moths to bright flame, Hiei reckons. At least his arm doesn't feel broken anymore—he can't really feel anything from waist up.
"Hie—I mean, Sir," Mera hesitates, "Um…"
"Stop wasting time. Speak."
"When this is all over… can we really—um— it's just—well... I mean..."
"After the mission, girl," Hiei says. "If it's important, save it 'til then."
He sees her tightly clenched fists, and she snaps out a stiff, "Yes, Captain."
Hiei sighs, adjusting Mera's worn red scarf and ruffling his hand through her hair rather unprofessionally. She softens a little under his touch. "And don't get fucking killed. Dismissed, brat."
He can hear Mera scream for him even from where he lay a hundred bodies or so away, and it drowns out the sound of his own struggling heartbeats.
The second time they meet, Hiei is thirteen, and the son of the owner of a small wine company near the sea. His father had apparently named him after a legend in times past, when their country's war had not yet ended.
Mera is nineteen and tutors Hiei in the countryside, far from the city lights in the south. They live in a small, peaceful village. No one there has ever seen war.
Nightmares wake Hiei at times, dreams of flashing blades and loud noises, figures which rise and fall out of cloying mist, dull pain of his body breaking, and on particular nights, Hiei would wake to a foreign woman's echoing scream. He'd shake solemnly in his bed, cold sweat a delicate sheet of wet on his nape and on those nights, his eyes would glare at a place far beyond the wooden rafters, through the shifting curtains of the worlds. There was something missing. Something that was meant to be his.
Something that was taken from him.
"We won the war," his father declares proudly one night at the dinner table when Mera is staying over, and she gets a faraway look in her eyes. An old soldier's look (but that doesn't make any sense, because Mera isn't a fighter in any sense, and Hiei has never met any old soldiers).
"My great-great-grandmother fought here in the war," grins Mera through a mouthful of food. "Remember you thought her scarf was yours, Hiei? The red one I wore the other day…"
Hiei 'hn's nonchalantly, poking dully at a piece of green on his plate before flicking it off onto the floor when no one's looking, and their old sheep dog makes sure there's no evidence left behind. Hiei celebrates his victory over the enemy in a barely there grin.
That night, he dreams again. This time, he sees clearly. He's standing on a battlefield, and people are clashing brutally around him. It's impossible to tell how many different forces are conflicting. But everything is silent to him, and he cannot move. Then, a red scarf seems to drift onto the scene from nowhere at all, quite natural meandering through sword and man and blood—so much, so much blood. Hiei finds that he can move all of a sudden, and he stretches out his lead-heavy arm, and he catches it. It's red and wet. So are his hands.
Once, Hiei asks Mera about his dreams.
"You're such a moody kid!" Mera laughs as she flips absentmindedly through a stack of books in search for her misplaced lesson plan. "Been watching scary movies with your Dad again haven't you?" This Mera says that because she's never tasted despair, and something in Hiei cries out that this is the wrong Mera, and it's strange because this Mera is the only Mera he's ever known.
The summer Hiei turns seventeen his father takes them both down to the seaside where a battle had been fought a long, long time ago. After Hiei's father leaves them to go relieve his bowels in a nearby shack, Mera accidentally swims out too far—
—but Hiei reaches her in time—"Mera, you dumb brat!"—and they sit in the sunlight together after Hiei brings them both to shore. She smiles sweetly at him and he wonders, where did 'dumb brat' come from? Hasn't Mera always been older than him? Even stranger, Mera doesn't ask.
As they leave the beach together, Hiei steps on something strangely hard.
Even before the explosion sounds Hiei finds that somehow, he already knows what he has triggered. And the scream he hears then hits his heart like a ton of bricks. Heavy like a blow from a skilled swordsman who he's raised his sword just in time to parry. Hiei wants to ask that voice: "who are you?" But breathing has become such a chore so he stops.
The third time they meet, Hiei is thirty and she's eating ice-cream as she waits for the bus, which is late as usual. She watches kids crossing the road from the corner of her vision before reaching up to wipe sweat from her eyes.
She sees through blurry film a blue car round the corner far too quickly, she sees a kid bending over in the middle of the road to pick up her doll, and she sees the future; she turns her face away quickly, knowing it is far too late to do anything.
She never learns the girl's name or her age, and only her brief cry of pain sounds familiar when she's struck and killed over the blue bonnet, body flung limply to the curb. Hiei kneels, closes the child's glassy eyes and places the doll back in her nerveless arms.
It's an unlucky day. Hiei wishes for the ancient Shinto blade she had seen in the shops earlier in the morning when she comes home to an armed man in her hallway. She's surprised with a grazing shot to the shoulder, but the robber has the nastier shock when the short woman in front of him shrugs it off, slams her fist into his face, twists his neck. The gun in his hands goes off a second time, and they both hit the ground at more or less the same instant.
Hiei has always thought using guns is cheating.
She swears emphatically, her uninjured arm clutching at her chest. Hiei reaches over to the fallen gun, presses it against her own temple.
"May as well get it over with."
The fourth time they meet, Hiei is preparing for his performance as the audience cheers on his colleague. Then it's his turn, and he stands upright on the tightrope, muscles relaxed under bright lighting even though there is no safety net below. The audience loves it. Loves him. He casts a glance over to the stands, and his eyes meet with a man's in the crowd.
A shock of recognition jolts through him and he loses his balance in a rapturously slow motion. There is something hauntingly familiar in that man's cry as Hiei wobbles and pin-wheels his arms in a futile circle, before he falls.
He manages to catch himself with one hand, limberly climbing back onto the rope to the crowd's applause and completes his routine. Ending with a bow, he's still shaking from adrenaline as he retreats to the privacy of his trailer.
When the show is over, he sees that man again at the end of the meet and greet.
"Hey mate," the man says. "You alright?"
The man wears a red scarf which clashes terribly with handsome sea-green eyes. Hiei feels the smallest spark of interest before it's all buried by a bludgeoning wave of inexplicable sorrow, by a kind of awful, sickening longing which Hiei believes should only reasonably exist within Botan's grating soap operas. But... who's Botan?
"Why are you here tonight?" Hiei finds himself asking with a sort of tired desperation before he could school his voice into a more neutral tone.
"Because I remembered there was something I never got to tell you," the man answers him cryptically. Then he steps forwards, catching Hiei in a hug. And Hiei lets him. For a second, a peculiar stabbing pain runs through Hiei' chest and gut under the man's crushing hold, and yet the man's hold on him is so soft and too brief. The startling sensation disappears just as quickly as it had appeared. People are staring at them both, but Hiei finds that all he's concerned about is the untidy way that red scarf is now sitting around that man's neck.
"Thanks, Captain," Mera says when they separate.
"What?"
"I said 'thanks, Hiei'."
Even now Mera is shorter than him. Hiei shakes off his errant thought. They've never met. He'll never see this man again after tonight probably.
"Ah… you know—I gotta go now—" He mumbles something about having a curfew. "Just…stay safe."
"Hn…"
The stranger cuts off Hiei's contemplative murmur, snapping into a salute he doesn't recognise. "We'll meet again someday, sir. I'll find you."
Hiei doesn't doubt it. He returns the gesture, and then stands still for some time staring at his hands, wondering why it had felt so natural.
(In the morning he wakes up early to practise, and doesn't pay attention to the ominous creaking of a loose overhead beam until it's too late.)
The fifth time they meet, neither are paying attention and they both get off from the same train without even making eye contact.
Hiei is in his twenties and traveling the world without any real plans for his future. He skimps out on food, goes to the cheapest inns and does not wonder what he missed by not turning to accept the pamphlet held out to him by a random worker on the roadside.
Years onwards, Hiei wonders why he always felt something was missing. What could it be that he hadn't found after all those years traveling? He climbs into bed with his wife of forty years and pulls the covers up with quivery, wrinkled hands.
The sixth time they meet, Hiei stares down the barrel of a gun into the enemy soldier's eyes, who flinches violently as if in recognition.
It's too late to stop his shot and there's something terribly off about the soldier's cry, despairing, as her body jerks around in the mud. Darkness takes Hiei as well before he can remember a name.
The seventh time they meet, they part ways at the foot of those metal stairs that creaks when Mera steps on them, creaks more than her bones as she climbs them gingerly, and sometimes he thought that the stairs would give before she did. She leans against old brick wall halfway up, tired, wheezing, and God it takes her so much effort just to find a way to kill herself. She makes it eventually though, and the ground near the place they came to be a mere two meters apart is painted gruesome.
The day after, a young plant growing in front of the alleyway is pulled out by an inquisitive child, before her mother catches up with the run-away toddler and screams at the blood covering her child's hands, and the crumpled figure which lay a little further in. That young plant doesn't grow again.
The eighth time they meet, Mera is twenty one. Today the sea wind tears at her hair wildly and she squints against it into the distance, drawing the red scarf around her face a little closer. It's an expensive old scarf, tattered at the ends and has three holes in total; they had all been patched carefully, especially the one close to where her lover's name is embroidered in black thread. As the subtle movement brings her hand up to scrape against a freckled cheek, she notices her fingers feel a little rougher than before—a little more calloused, and had she really been biting her nails so much?
When she reaches the home she shares with her boyfriend, all the lights inside are out, but he is home. She slips inside quietly, creeping into their shared bed a moment later though they both felt a little ridiculous about it; Mera never let anything happen between them after all. Sometimes the night feels a little too stifling, a little too lonely, and Mera moves awkwardly from his side to her desk. She watches his prone figure, listening to deep and even breaths as his chest moves gently up and down, illuminated by flickering candlelight, but she's sure he's awake under those thin sheets. It's too cold to sleep. Sighing, she watches wax drip down the sole candlestick, watches the slow drips until morning comes and all the while she misses another flame; his flame burned so much brighter, so much warmer. Someone rings the doorbell just as she stands stiffly to make herself breakfast.
She opens the door to an unfamiliar man, who takes her in his arms without a word, and she lets him.
"You didn't come looking for me," he says to her after a while.
Mera cries.
They meet for the final time.
AN: Let me explain this fic. It can be seen as Alternate Universe, but it could really take place in the YYH world if reincarnation is possible there. The 'canvas' bit in the beginning is important, because all this could have just happened in Mera's or Hiei's thoughts (their yearning, imagining what could have been) in a single lifetime, but with both their deaths approaching they can no longer produce any fully fleshed out stories in which they could be together, and the sense of inevitable death follows their thoughts-they cannot imagine a happy end. But at the end, i changed my mind and left it open.
Meeting for the final time means no more reincarnation. Why? Because in the final lifetime they've both become demons. This leads off to my series fic which is up on my profile haha, see, it all works out.