A/N: Yes, I know this plot was used in a movie. That's why I cannot claim copyright for it. I got this idea after seeing a fanvid on YouTube about Hiei being the son of the devil, and then I got to thinking. It's a pretty darn plausible idea – the identity of Hiei's father is a complete mystery, Hiei summons fire from the pits of Hell, and he's…Hiei. You know, bloodthirsty, homicidal, all that jazz. Enjoy my pitiful attempt at horror.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Yu Yu Hakusho, and neither do I own The Omen. In fact, I don't even have the guts to watch a horror movie like that…And by the way, Homework ga Owaranai is not going to be showing up. It has been absorbed into this story. Hehe.
– – – O – – –
When Hiei is kidnapped by his estranged father, it is up to the splintered Team Urameshi to save him. But they themselves are on the run from justice, convicted for a crime they didn't commit. Now the Devil awakens to claim his prey...literally.
HAJIME
Chapter 1. Insomnia
"Maybe she even cries in her sleep sometime, wondering where her brother is and if her dear Mr. Hiei has found him yet…"
– Mukuro
– – – O – – –
The landscape was pale, as they always were in these sort of dreams. Was he always resigned to walking about on icy ground in this fantasy world? Soft, powdery snow stirred up in the wake of his soundless, phantom footsteps, falling slowly in a brooding murmur. A cool wind answered, whispering mischievously as it brushed against his cheek.
As always, the tall spires of a hidden city appeared, specter-like, out of the thick veil the show cast on his vision. It was a familiar sight, and he sighed inwardly. Maybe this would be over soon.
No such luck. As he walked through the village, he was aware of a strange silence, broken only by the soft padding of his own footsteps and the shrill whistling of the wind through open windows. Open windows? In a snowstorm like this, they would be closed against the threatening tempest. It was no longer the Glacial Village inhabited by ice maidens that he knew; the whole place was deserted, a ghost town.
Soon, he was outside the village and in the graveyard. With some surprise, he noted that there were many more new additions to the tombstones already there, jutting up out of the ground as if the bodies inside them were still trying to get out. The wind was different now, no longer playful, but more solemn, like a child silenced at a funeral but not quite knowing why.
He walked past several of the markers, noting that two names were familiar to him. Hina. Rui. Then, with a sort of morbid satisfaction, he noticed that the village elder's marker was placed a little further away. But a lone figure at the end of the site caught his eye, and he hurried towards it.
Sea-green hair fluttered slightly in the breeze, a kimono now worn threadbare clinging in a pitiful fashion to a rail-thin frame. Her back was facing him, but he knew who it was anyway. He reached her, and tentatively put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't stir, her head still bowed to the gravestone before her and hiding its inscription from view.
He shook harder, and she moved limply along with him without changing her position. Wondering what was wrong, he turned her around.
The sight that met his eyes made a muffled yell of shock escape his lips. Her eyes, a softer reflection of his own, were glazed and had rolled back in her head. Blood streamed from slightly parted lips, staining snowy skin with the precious fluid. One lone chrysanthemum, even paler than her flesh and the snow, rested between serenely folded hands, the effect marred only by sanguine liquid dripping slowly from bleeding fingertips.
Chrysanthemums, he now remembered, were the flowers of the dead.
His eyes were drawn irresistibly to the words carved deep into the rough-hewn stone, not yet covered with the ice of this world. They looked as if they had been scratched with some blunt tool, a testimony to the girl's bleeding fingers. Vision strangely blurred – was it from tears? – he focused on what she had written on the rock before her imminent death. It listed her name and birthdate, which he skipped over, gazing disbelievingly at the crooked words at the bottom.
Brother, I do not blame you for my death. Forgive me, for I can no longer keep the monster that lies within you at bay.
His scream of pain and horror carried through the ice-bound landscape and back into reality.
– – – O – – –
"Didn't sleep too well?"
Hiei attempted to glare at Mukuro. The dark rings around his eyes spoiled the effect, though, giving Hiei the amusing appearance of a teenage goth that hadn't quite gotten the hang of applying eye shadow. In addition to this, the whites of the fire apparition's eyes were patterned with enough red lines to make a road map. Mukuro wondered whether she should offer him some eyedrops.
"Papo snored too much," Hiei muttered shortly. Mukuro nearly nodded sympathetically, then stopped herself when a little voice in her head told her that Hiei was probably lying, though the fib was quite plausible. The demon in question, Papo, was a tiny creature with an enormous nose. Coupled with his asthma, Papo's snoring abilities were known to shake rooms to their very foundations.
Hiei had been roomed with him, Kirin, and another demon by the curious name of Cola, and all three of them would've murdered Papo by now if his smelling abilities weren't so useful during patrols.
"I think you need a vacation," she said thoughtfully.
Hiei wondered whether she was going insane. With the dreams that had been plaguing his sleep lately, idleness was the last thing he needed. Work – even if it was work that dealt with stinking humans – helped keep him busy and prohibited his mind from visiting that icy graveyard in his waking moments.
Of course, that said nothing about his sleep…
"Are you insane?" he asked, in slightly incredulous tones. Mukuro raised a thin eyebrow at him. She'd thought that Hiei would've wanted a vacation, especially with the attitude he had towards work. From what she knew about the human world, Hiei's disposition greatly resembled that of a babysitter condemned with the task of watching over several very bratty children.
The metaphorical babysitter probably would've been out the door as soon as the parents unlocked it, and Mukuro had expected Hiei to have been gone before she could finish her sentence. When his reaction came as a surprise, she decided to probe a little more. "Why not?"
Hiei scowled. "I don't want to get closer to humans than I already have to."
"Have you visited your sister lately?"
Hiei's eyes narrowed, and if looks could kill, the rest of Mukuro's biological body would've been incinerated right then and there. As it was, her mortal life was spared for the moment and the onetime queen of Demon World remained unfazed.
"That is none of your business," Hiei snapped, every word dripping poison. Mukuro grinned inwardly. If he was getting so worked up over a simple question, he definitely had something on his conscience.
"She'll miss you, you know."
Hiei was turning away to go out the door. Time to play the trump card. Feigning innocent naiveté, Mukuro continued. "Maybe she even cries in her sleep sometime, wondering where her brother is and if her dear Mr. Hiei has found him yet…"
Hiei stopped as if someone had clubbed him on the head. Mukuro smiled. Checkmate.
"I guess you should go see her, hm?"
The fire apparition snorted in a way that let Mukuro know that she had won, now matter how underhanded her victory was. "Hn."
And then he was gone.
– – – O – – –
The landscape wasn't white this time. Far to the contrary – the whole place was tinted bloodred, and with good reason.
He was standing on a battlefield, clutching a sword with no knowledge of how he came to be holding it. Bodies littered the ground, and he was struck with an almost overwhelming sense of déjà vu. How many times had he been in this position, holding a bloodstained blade, poised atop the bodies of the nameless dead? How many times had he almost been in their position?
He didn't want to get on that train of thought, so instead of standing around and staring, he began to walk, his sword still tight in his grip.
Besides his muffled footsteps, there was nothing to break the silence. The wind was gone now, as though scared off by something bigger, something looming in the distance. He had the sudden urge to scream out, to yell, to laugh, to do something to break this damned hush. Silence did more damage to the psyche than unbearable noise did, sometimes. It was the opposite of claustrophobia – it was too much space, someplace that you could get lost in…
He could practically smell the emptiness. Not sure what to expect, he trudged on, ignoring the unbelievably loud crunching of bones underfoot. The peculiar sensation that eyes were watching him from every direction was giving him the creeps, and now he finally understood what the idiot meant when he talked about the "tickle feeling."
It was like a maddening itch, and he wanted even more now to shriek as loudly as a petulant child that didn't get his way. Reining in his emotions with some difficulty, he looked down to distract himself.
It occurred vaguely to him that it might not have been the best thing to do.
Orange hair here…black hair there…and were those long red tresses or just streaks of blood? Looking further along, he could see strands of mahogany mixed in with blue raspberry. Honeyed chestnut came next, and then the thing he had been dreading to see – sea green. Altogether, it looked like some kind of grotesque mixture of that human dessert – what was it called again?
Oh, yes. Ice cream.
He could see the eyes now – black, brown, green, or red, it didn't matter; the whole palette of colors mixed together into a dizzying, accusing kaleidoscope that swirled around him until he almost couldn't take it anymore. He fell to his knees at the sudden rush of nausea, clutching his belly and dry heaving. His sword dropped beside him.
This was insane. He was insane. Going crazy, going mad…when was this ever going to stop? The pressure on his mind was nearly too much.
Save me. Save me. Someone, please…
And yet, no shining angel in white came to rescue his soul. His own heartbeat echoed in his ears like an incessant drum, his harsh breathing an accompaniment to a one-man symphony. He squeezed his eyes shut – no tears came, and his eyelids couldn't block out the horror of the battlefield.
Who had killed them? Who?
The laughter of those who had died echoed within the emptiness that was his mind, mockingly cheerful.
Don't you understand? It was you who killed them. You, you, you…
Someone was screaming now, screaming like someone was killing them. He wanted to tell them to shut up, to keep their troubles to themselves, but they didn't hear him. They kept right on screaming, rending through the perfectly imperfect silence of a bloodstained battlefield.
Somewhere in the haze of his own insanity, he realized it was his own scream.
– – – O – – –
The dreams were becoming increasingly repetitive, Hiei realized faintly, as his eyes flew open again.
It was an incredibly morbid thought, one that was just barely short of asking the demons of sleep to throw something even more horrific and challenging at him, just to see if his subconscious could handle the strain. He stifled that thought uneasily and settled back against the trunk of the tree he'd chosen to sleep in.
He'd had second thoughts about actually visiting his sister earlier and turned back before reaching the door of the temple, but much to his chagrin, the members of his ex-team had been coming up the steps behind him. It would've be far to conspicuous to flit out of sight after they'd all gotten a good glimpse of him, so he had merely stood and stared…er, glared, at them.
Kurama had smiled. "Why, hello, Hiei. On vacation?"
"The only one that Mukuro will give me," Hiei had retorted, holding onto his bravado and conveniently forgetting that he had refused the vacation at first. Yusuke had grinned, and Hiei had noticed (with no small amount of annoyance) that Raizen's heir had gotten taller since the last time he'd seen him.
"Mukuro must be workin' you hard, huh? It's been two frickin' long years since we saw you, midget."
Kuwabara had muttered something that sounded faintly like "not long enough," but had been cut off by the appearance of a small young woman, who had stepped out onto the patio.
"Oh, hello, Yusuke, Kazuma, Kurama, Hiei." Had it just been his imagination or had she paused for just a moment before saying his name? "Would you like to come in and have some tea?"
He stifled a sardonic smile. Oh, his sister was as innocent as ever. She looked exactly the same, not aged a moment from the day Hiei had left to go to Demon World in search of Mukuro and her power. With her hair tied back and her small frame clothed in a pale blue kimono, she looked young. Painfully so, like a porcelain doll frozen in the throes of time.
Unlike him. Oh, so unlike him.
One pale hand reached into his shirt, pulling out again with a strand of thread tangled between his fingers. Hiei watched his mother's tear gem dangle before his eyes, reflecting the pale light of very early dawn in its deep blue depths.
Dreams, he thought disparagingly, frowning at his image in the gem. Weak fabrications of the mind. They are nothing.
He wasn't afraid of them. No…he wasn't afraid of those dreams where he found himself standing next to Yukina's bedside, splattered with her blood, watching the light leave her eyes as she succumbed to the clutches of death. Sometimes it was Yusuke instead, sometimes Kuwabara, sometimes Kurama. Sometimes it was Mukuro, and he would laugh maniacally as the machinery on one half of her body continued twitching long after she was dead.
Hiei groaned and fought the urge to gag.
He had always been good at lying to himself, but not now. In his more interesting fantasies (fabricated when he was distracted and bored), he pictured their deaths, and sometimes even his own. But they were never at his hands. He was never the last one standing, with his hands covered in sanguine liquid and another scar on his soul.
The day was beginning now, and Hiei hopped down onto the ground. Inside, he could hear soft rustling noises as Yukina got up to begin preparing breakfast. Not having anything else to do, he went inside to join his sister in her morning duties.
– – – O – – –
A/N: Maybe this won't make much sense. Maybe it will. It's so darn hard, though, to write something that's both original and interesting. Well, hope this is enough of a teaser for you guys. Thanks for reading.
Note
Hajime means beginning in Japanese.
Papo is NOT an OC. He made an appearance in the anime – the little demon that was smelling the air and then told Hiei that he was picking up a human scent.
Lots of love to my wonderful beta, xblackrosefirex. Thanks for putting up with my constant revisions.