Kuwabara is honour.
His sheer persistence amazes Hiei sometimes; the way he sees the world in a different light – dare he say, a purer light – and somehow manages to hold on to that ideal despite all the evil surrounding him. His honour code is absurd, impractical, a fool's effort to maintain chivalry in a world that punishes anything moral; strange, Hiei thinks, that his eccentric ideas seem to triumph over the certainty of all those who resist him. It is honour that drives him on, long past the point where everyone else would have given up; honour that gives him the strength of will to believe in the essential goodness of life beyond all Hiei's cynicism. In him, Hiei sees the seeds of a better world, sees that honour that he himself could never afford to have, sees that innocent courage, filled with knowledge of its own inner truth, that his life never gave him the opportunity to have. And so he jeers at him, rails against his attitudes in secret bitterness his own compassion feels; sneers at his ideals because he knows what will happen to those who hold that sincerity, that purity. He has seen his own stripped away, and he waits for it to happen to Kuwabara, but it doesn't, and that is the most bitter thing of all. But he cannot grudge him his luck; can only wish it was his own, and stick all the more doggedly to his own sense of right and wrong. Kuwabara is a talisman, a hope he holds up to defend his right to be honourable, his right to integrity.
A/N: next: hope. Cookies to anyone who can guess who it is. By the way, there will be no pairing implications in this set, so I'm valiantly suppressing my HK brain. You have three characters to choose from: Mukuro, Kurama and Yukina. I may add Shigure later but I don't have him planned out; I can't quite decide what their relationship was.