The Mystery of the Long-sleeved Shirt

Third in the Language of Flowers one-shot series.

It was at one of Yusuke's 'post-mission parties' (Read: booze-fests) that Hiei first realised that Kurama never took his shirt off in front of anyone.

They were playing a game of Truth and Dare. Since there were six of them – Yusuke, Kuwabara, Kurama, Botan, Keiko and Shizuru – Kurama offered a dice and said that each of them could choose a number. Kurama took the six, and after about three hours of play his turn hadn't come yet.

'You're cheating,' Yusuke said finally.

'All right, I'll switch numbers with you,' Kurama said promptly, and his streak of amazing good luck continued.

Hiei snorted. He could sense the slight life energy in the dice. It was too subtle for the others to sense, but since it was made of wood, Kurama was cheating. 2+24. Things like that.

'I'll play,' he announced, hopping off the window-sill where he was watching from. It was a simple trick for him to block the control Kurama had imposed. In three rolls of the dice, it was Kurama's turn.

'Truth or Dare, Kurama?' Yusuke said gleefully. It was his turn to ask.

'Truth,' Kurama said. The last time he had taken dare had required some very fast talking and a memory wipe. Who knew that Yusuke's idea of scaring the neighbours involved man-eating plants?

'Is it true that nobody's seen you with your shirt off?'

Kurama paled just a little. Then he blushed a lot. 'Not since I was thirteen. And not in a non-platonic way.'

Yusuke sat back, smug. Keiko had told him that no sex-related questions were allowed, but he had neatly confirmed Kurama's celibacy without actually asking. Kuwabara owed him big for this one.

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Kurama was quite happy to be back home. They had stopped playing before his turn came again and Yusuke thought to ask why he never took his shirt off in public. That answer was definitely too embarrassing to reveal.

He entered his room and shut the door. He took a quick shower and changed into his thin night-clothes and switched on the bedside lamp to reveal Hiei sitting on his window, arm bent across one knee, the other dangling down, not quite touching the floor.

'So?' the jaganshi said.

'So what?'

'So why don't you ever take your shirt off?'

Mentally, Kurama cringed. 'That's a ridiculous thing to say. Of course I take my shirt off. Imagine the kind of stink I'd have by now if I didn't. It would be my deadliest weapon.'

'I,' Hiei said, 'am not stupid.'

'Really, I do. I change my clothes, I bathe. I need to take my shirt off for those, don't I?'

'Don't play the fool with me. You wear those long-sleeved shirts all the time. You never use public baths, and you don't take your shirt off in PE like most of the other boys do, and you manage to be the first in and the last out to the school showers. Hell, you don't even cut your sleeves off to fight!'

'That's not true. There was that one time with the short sleeves, and Youko's not very particular about how much he's g – hey, wait a minute. Why were you hanging around my school?'

'I was bored. ……And don't change the subject.'

'It nearly worked.'

' "There's no such thing as nearly dead. You're either kicking or alive," ' Hiei quoted.

'Makai proverbs are real fun, aren't they?'

'Still changing the subject.'

With a frustrated huff, Kurama threw himself face-down on the bed. 'Can we do this later? I'm halfway to sloshed, and I like to fall asleep before I get really drunk and start Having Fun.'

'Having fun, hmm,' Hiei mused. 'Does it involve blood, murder, taking over the world, random insanity or screaming people?'

'Mostly the last two,' Kurama admitted. 'The first two are hard to explain away to the police, and the bloodstains really don't wash well from silk. The third really doesn't give me the time to maintain my grades. I've tried.'

Hiei shot him a strange look. 'You're drunk. Either that, or your sense of priorities is deeply warped.'

'Blame it on my history teacher. She's the one who taught me that school matters more than anything else. Especially the work she assigns.'

'She the one with the French braids and the incredibly tight–'

'Yes,' Kurama said hastily. 'She has this…this aura around her. It's almost demonic.'

Silence fell. Kurama's eyes grew heavy.

'Fox.'

'What is it, Hiei?' he said sleepily.

'You still haven't told me why you never take your shirt off.'

'I just don't, all right?' he snapped, his eyes still closed. 'Just because the rest of you have this burning need to prove your own masculinity doesn't mean I have to shred my clothing and bare my hairy chest to the adoring fangirls whenever I want to swat a flea. Not that there were many of those at the dark tournament.'

'Hn.' There was a short, pregnant pause. 'Do you–'

'No, I don't have a hairy chest!' Kurama turned to face the wall and reached over to snap the light off. A small but strong hand clamped around his wrist.

'You're not going to sleep until you tell me.'

'Hiei–'

'It can't possibly be that bad. Demons don't scar, and judging by the rest of you, you're hardly deformed. Unless you really are a woman, like every other person who fights you seems compelled to point out.'

'You are about one insult away from being painfully killed. And why are you so fixated on this anyway?'

'It's annoying,' Hiei said, doing one of his blinky movements and sitting on the sill a nanosecond later.

'What is?'

'That I don't know.'

'Why?' Kurama said, honestly puzzled. 'It's really not that significant.'

But it was. Hiei was supposed to know more about the fox than anyone else alive, and he had missed this crucial bit of information. It unsettled him. Kurama knew entirely too much about him, and the only way he could feel safe was to have an equal amount of knowledge. They were matched in power, ability and intellect; the friction of their interaction was eased only if they were precisely matched in all the small things as well. Hiei hated weakness, and Kurama was the ultimate control freak. This shouldn't have mattered to him at all, but it was a major victory that the fox had very quietly stolen, and he didn't like it.

By the slight widening and narrowing of Kurama's eyes, Hiei knew that those thoughts had been plucked neatly off some minute movement of his body that even he wouldn't have noticed. The thief had learned to read people expertly over his lifetime, and the reincarnation hadn't lost those skills.

'Oh,' he said in a much lower voice. 'I didn't think you were thinking of that. At this date, I didn't imagine it would matter so much.' It had, at first. Their conversations had been elaborate dances, each trying to reveal as little and discover as much as possible. But the fox had stopped doing that a while ago, when he realised that his feelings for Hiei were changing. Apparently the half-breed didn't share his opinion.

Which hurt. A little. But he knew exactly how vulnerable Hiei had been, and how long, and it was a natural reaction that Kurama didn't need. He had spent the last few years in a loving family, and even before that hadn't felt very insecure. He enjoyed one-upmanship, but it was a game to him, not a necessity.

'Hn. It doesn't.' Hiei considered flitting away, but the rain had been pouring down for about five minutes now, and he hated being wet. The fates were truly against him.

The fox was quiet for a while, his eyes cast into shadows by the glaringly red bangs that fell over them. Just when Hiei thought he had fallen asleep, he spoke.

'If you must know, I have a tattoo.'

'A what?' said Hiei disbelievingly.

'A tattoo? You know, like that dragon you have on your arm? Except that mine doesn't smoke and kill people. Pity,' Kurama added. Hiei decided that he really didn't want to get Kurama roaring drunk. Ever.

'So what? Don't you have solvents that remove the tattoo?'

'For ordinary ones, yes, I have something that does the job. Unfortunately, this was done with one of my own inks. A dare was involved.'

'How much did you win?' Hiei smirked as he saw Kurama's expression. 'Don't tell me you didn't even have the wits to bet on it at the time. How old were you then?'

'Thirteen. I wasn't exactly sober. Remind me never to use fake ID and illusion to get into clubs again.'

'But Youko doesn't have a tattoo.'

'Which is correct, because it was Minamino Shuuichi who did it.'

'You got drunk and tattooed yourself on a dare.'

'That's it, pretty much.'

'You got drunk.'

'Yes.'

'And got a tattoo.'

'Yes.'

'When you were thirteen.'

'Yes,' said Kurama, who was getting irritated. 'Are you quite finished being stupid?'

'So what is it?'

'What?'

'The tattoo, you idiot fox. What is it?'

Kurama blushed, which was shocking in itself. 'It's really nothing.'

'I don't believe you.' Quick as a flash, he pinned Kurama to the headboard and sat on his legs, his other hand slicing neatly through the buttons on his nightshirt. Ignoring the fox's indignant yelp, he pushed the shirt off him and took a good look.

'Oh,' he said quietly, awed, resisting the unbearably strong impulse to reach out and touch. The tattoo covered part of Kurama's chest. It was fairly simple, done in black ink alone. The lines were clear and decisive, detailed. It was the work of a master artist. A fox stood on top of a circle with twenty-four spokes; it was centred over his heart. It held a small rose in its teeth, and its tail coiled around the symbol. Its ears were cocked up, and it gazed straight at Hiei with an old, wise cunning and supreme confidence in its own superiority.

Well, so much for the theory that Kurama was a woman. He most certainly was not. He wasn't hairy, either.

'The wheel. What does it mean?'

'This?' Kurama traced it casually with his fingertips, trying his utmost to look absolutely unconcerned by the fact that his best friend was sitting on him and had just ripped his clothes off. He firmly silenced the part of his Youko brain that could have edited, updated, revised and more than doubled the size of the Kama Sutra, and which was currently screaming and running and pulling its hair out and accusing him of having no libido whatsoever. 'It stands for the circle of life. An old symbol. Older, even, than I am.'

'Your arrogance is amazing,' Hiei said, shaking his head slightly. 'Triumphing over death itself, the fox. Only you would have chosen such a thing.'

'It's very well done, though. I paid for the best, and I got it.'

'Yes, the fox is beautiful,' said Hiei, and then risked a look at Kurama. The emerald eyes were shadowed, under control, blank. Suddenly, he felt very uncomfortable.

He moved so fast that the fox didn't even know he wasn't there until his warm weight was gone.

'So, now you know my darkest secret,' Kurama said lightly, trying to gloss over the awkwardness.

'One of them, at any rate,' Hiei grunted. 'And why are you so embarrassed by this, anyway?'

'It spoils my image. The perfect student and perfect son, Minamino Shuuichi, can't afford to be tattooed. And really, for all its style, it doesn't suit the infamous thief Kurama either.'

Hiei snorted. 'You're lying.'

'Is it that obvious?' one bright green eye peered at him.

'No.'

'…it's a private thing, Hiei. That tattoo says too much about me, and I tend to be possessive about what I reveal of myself to others.'

That, he could believe. The fox led a carefully compartmentalised existence. It also meant that he had crossed a very major line.

'I don't mind,' Kurama said on cue.

'Hn,' Hiei said dismissively, but he felt – and probably looked – absurdly pleased.

'On the other hand,' he continued, 'I do expect to be paid for that shirt.'

'You've got a closet full of them.'

'Can't be too rich, too thin, or the owner of too many silk nightshirts.'

'You're vain,' Hiei accused. The rain was slowing down, and he debated leaving. But the ledge was better than Kurama's tree, or the one in the park.

'Of course. It's my only virtue.'

'A virtue, fox?'

'You should see what my vices are like.'

'Hn.'

A/N: so, the mood's a little lighter here. The next one's written, and will be updated soon. Ever notice that Kurama really never takes his shirt off? At all? Thanks to Fate VII, whose author's note in Skeleton Dancer provided the inspiration for this. Enjoy.

Niru