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If asked what the color red means to him, Urameshi Yusuke is likely to retort by asking his questioner if they've ever been tested for insanity. If pressed, his answer comes short and sharp: one word, three letters. To him, the best images of red come from the fire-engine gloss of a woman's full lips, the sleek scarlet of a thigh-baring dress.
More recently, red has also come to mean the elegant spill of Kurama's hair over the pillow, the silken cinch of a favorite tunic about the fox-demon's slender waist. Red is the color that bleeds steadily into Yusuke's vision as he thrusts roughly into the warm body beneath him.
If asked what the color red means to him, Minamino Shuichi – Kurama only to a select few – answers with something immediate and complex: passion. As a scholar and – more importantly, really – as a teenage boy, he understands the sexual connotations well, but to him, red has always meant something more.
It is the color of red-haired Kuwabara's Code, strong and brave and true. It is the blood spat to the side and wiped carelessly off the chin in the midst of battle, disregarded in the intensity of the struggle. It is the heat and power of Hiei's fire, the life and death enshrined in his own precious flowers.
But perhaps the best visualization he can present of exactly what red means to him is the light flush of arousal that ripples across Yusuke's skin at Kurama's touches, the half-demon's grasping fingers tangled in his own crimson tresses as their bodies press and strain in the dark of night.
Yet unseen and unknown to all – except, perhaps, one Kuwabara Kazuma, who has always had an uncanny knack for detecting that which remains unseen by the natural perception of human senses – red is the precise and perfect color of the bond they share, half-demon and whole: the clear, intense love of a child's Valentine.