"Love"
by Mayushii
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A/N: And Hiei found that he didn't ever, ever want to feel that abomination humans called "love." This chapter is from Hiei's POV. Obviously human love isn't as bad as he thinks it is, but it's different. Please don't get mad, because I love Kuwabara+Yukina! I just had to find an example of human love and that was the first thing that came to mind.
STUDY
Hiei stared with narrowed eyes. Had the human really just said that? An illness? The fool had proclaimed himself a champion of love and justice only a few hours ago! How could Kuwabara possibly think that love was an illness? It just made no sense for Kuwabara to call it that, especially when he was so obviously enamored with Yukina.
So what was it that bothered the human about Itsuki's confession? Did he think that a demon's love was somehow less pure than a human's, that it would contaminate him? That was just shit, Hiei thought. Had he forgotten that Yukina was a demon? If a human's love was purer than hers, Hiei would throw down his sword and swear off fighting for the rest of his life.
Hiei glanced out of the corner of his eye at Kurama. He recognized the narrow-eyed stare and the small frown. Clearly the fox was bothered by Kuwabara's statement. Given his years living among humans, Hiei wondered if Kurama knew what Kuwabara had meant, because Hiei wasn't familiar with human culture and the whole thing had flown right over his head.
Oftentimes, Hiei found himself looking to Kurama for help in understanding human concepts, but it wasn't just in the field of human cultures that Hiei admired his expertise. In almost every way, Kurama was older, wiser, and smarter. So much more experienced, so calm and cool, and so very good-looking... Kurama was everything Hiei wanted to be.
Hiei thought sometimes that he loved his best friend.
After all, love was admiration. You didn't love someone if you didn't respect them in some way. In Makai, Hiei had found that healthy, loving demons were both wildly affectionate and fanatically jealous of their own mates. If there was one thing Hiei had learned, it was that there was no difference between wanting someone and wanting to be like someone. The two concepts were inseparable and indivisible. It made relationships in Makai rather passionate because love and jealousy tended to be in equal measures. And this desire to be like one's mate also meant that when looking for romance, demons often took mates of the same sex because they identified with them more. This, in Hiei's mind, was just the natural order of the world.
So yes, Hiei admired Kurama. And he was jealous of him. That was just how love worked. And how was Itsuki's love for Sensui any different? Itsuki recognized traits in Sensui that he admired, and that made him both like and envy the human. It was...natural.
But what about Kuwabara? Hiei thought further. Kuwabara always said that he "loved" Yukina. He "loved" that she was small, sweet, beautiful, pure, and a girl. Yet Kuwabara picked on Hiei because he was small, made fun of Yusuke because he was sweet and pure, questioned Kurama's ability to fight because he was beautiful...and his ultimate insult for any one of them was that they were "being a girl." To Hiei, it sounded like Kuwabara did not want to be like Yukina at all—that perhaps he even pitied her. What sense did that make? How was that love?
The one thing that humans claimed made them different from everyone else was that they could love. But this...this thing they felt was not love. It was... It was...
Some human emotion, not love, but something else. Hiei thought that it must be some sort of perverted sexual desire, like masochism or necrophilia. You weren't supposed to like being hurt and humiliated, or to be attracted to corpses, but some weird, perverted people did. It wasn't healthy, it wasn't right. You didn't pity someone you loved. It was backwards!
And that sort of perversion was something healthy demons did not feel. It was a purely human sickness, to be attracted to someone you didn't respect. And Hiei found that he didn't ever, ever want to feel that abomination humans called "love."
CONCLUSION
The emotion demons call "love" does not equate to the human emotion of the same name. Demons associate romance with admiration instead of reproduction. As such, demons have come to conclude that a romantic partner should be someone to respect and emulate. Because reproduction is not necessarily included in romance, same-sex relations are common and even favored among demons. Sex for reproduction appears to have little emotional significance.