Chapter 8 – Parental Anomalies
Hiei tried to reason that the ugly old dog demon before him had only said the name Hina because that was the name Inukasai had brought back from his visit to the ice village. The fat mongrel was probably senile, and had taken so many lovers, it was highly likely he could not remember all their names. The ice maiden he had bedded had probably given Hina's name as a cover, too ashamed to reveal her own name to him lest he spread the word that his repulsive body had been the one and only she had found so irresistible that she had forgotten the consequences of doing so and gone ahead and copulated with him.
"A-are you sure about that?" the ferry girl asked.
"Yes, I am," Inuyusha replied. "How could I forget such a lovely name?"
"Well, you are quite old, and more than a tad inbred and eccentric…" the ferry girl brazenly muttered.
"I know her name was Hina and Inukasai confirmed it when he visited the ice village and was told the same thing," Inuyusha replied with more than a hint of irritation in his voice. "If you do not trust this old man to remember correctly, surely you at least trust that the ice maidens know which of their own birthed an emiko? After all, the birth of an emiko is a rare and important incident, and as there were only eight emikos born to the ice village, they could hardly forget the details of so few occurrences."
Hiei stepped closer to Inuyusha, his interest suddenly renewed in the nonsense the old man was spouting.
"Eight?" he said.
"Yes, I noticed that too!" the ferry girl jumped in, moving around in her seat to fully face Inuyusha. "You said there were only eight emikos ever born: how did you know that?"
"When my love and I discussed what our child would be like, she told me then that there had been seven others before," Inuyusha replied.
Hiei really, really wished that the odious, old and odorous dog demon would cease referring to his mother as his lover.
"One of those seven must have been you, Hiei."
Hiei growled and bared his teeth – something he knew was a wasted gesture against a dog demon, who could exercise the threat far more effectively – as his ire rose at once more meeting someone who thought he was older than Inukasai. It was not that he was vain and cared about his physical appearance or how youthful he looked, but it did really bother him that looking good and looking youthful was just yet another thing that Inukasai was better at than he was.
Hiei knew that it was illogical to get angry about such a thing: after all, Inukasai was clearly not as fast, not as strong nor even as skilled a warrior as Hiei was, and that alone – by demon world standards at least – made Hiei more important. Inukasai lived a relatively humble existence in a filthy village of dirty and weak demons with low sexual morals, whilst Hiei was second-in-command to Mukuro, a former king of demon world. Inukasai's wife was relatively weak and only strikingly attractive when compared to the other residents of Inugoya, and she was most likely his half-sister (her father was surely Inuyusha and her mother was probably also one of Inuyusha's daughters).
Still, whether she was the child of her husband's father and her own sister or not, she was still Inukasai's wife, and she was definitely pregnant; Hiei wondered if he ought to mention the oddity of that to Inukasai or just wait until the child was born and let the phony see the problem for himself.
"So there must have been nine emikos born by now," the ferry girl said. "At least."
Inuyusha frowned at her and she appeared to be annoyed by his response.
"Well clearly there is, because Hiei is a lot younger than Inukasai!" she snapped. "Maybe seven were born before Inukasai – who was number eight – but Hiei was born after Inukasai, which makes him number nine. Or ten. Or eleven. Or twelve. Or–"
" We get the point!" Hiei snapped.
The ferry girl stopped, though she gave him a look that implied that she wanted to continue.
"My son is only in his seventy-ninth year," Inuyusha said.
"In that case he's a whole quarter of a century older than Hiei, you blind old fool!" Botan yelled.
She was almost foaming at the mouth: for Hiei it was simultaneously embarrassing to be associated with her and strangely reassuring that someone else felt exactly the same way he did and was unafraid of how foolish she looked openly expressing it.
"My mistake," Inuyusha said to Hiei. "Perhaps you were emiko number nine then."
"Hn, of course I was."
Hiei turned his back on Botan and Inuyusha. Learning that creep was lucky number eight and he was unlucky number nine was almost laughable, and so appropriate it just had to be true. After all, the number eight meant prosperous and the number nine meant suffering. How typical.
"I am sorry I cannott tell you any more," Inuyusha offered.
"Are you sorry because you don't know anything more to tell us, or are you sorry because you feel guilty about all the other information you're hiding from us?" the ferry girl responded.
Hiei looked back over his shoulder to find her up on her knees, her hands supporting her weight against the arm of the sofa and her body leaning over the edge towards Inuyusha. She was glaring at him in a way she often did with Yusuke when she was nagging him about something, and the look might have had some effect were it not for the wood elf outfit she was still wearing, which, in her current position, was affording the pervert old leader of the dog demon tribe an almost dangerously explicit view down her top.
"Let's go, Botan," Hiei said.
"I think he's hiding something, Hiei!" she replied, leaning closer still to Inuyusha, who's eyes had lowered to her chest.
"I mean it, let's go!" Hiei said sternly.
"The least you can do is tell us everything you know!" she said to Inuyusha.
"Well I can see why Hiei married you," Inuyusha replied, smiling lecherously.
"What?" she echoed.
Hiei leapt forwards and grabbed one of Botan's arms, dragging her from the sofa. She yelped and stumbled after him, saying something about him being too rough, but he was sure that his dragging her by her arm was a more agreeable experience than the alternative that would have taken place had he left her thrusting her chest into the face of an old man who had been about to grab at what she appeared to be offering him.
"We're leaving," Hiei told her.
"They still have my bag!" she protested.
Hiei did not especially want to carry a bag full of crap from spirit world anywhere, least of all back down the mountain path, but she had said that the bag contained seventy-five hirui stones, and that was practically enough to buy a village the size of Inugoya, and the bandit in Hiei could not resist the temptation to take it back.
"Give my wife back her bag," he told Inuyusha. "And you better not have taken anything from it."
"It's over there somewhere, please, take it," Inuyusha replied, waving a hand at one corner of the room,
Hiei marched over – inadvertently dragging Botan with him as he had forgotten to let go of her arm – to a pile of linen, releasing Botan once he reached his destination and crouching down to claw through the piles of stained sheets. He quickly uncovered the giant bag, dragging it out from under all the other rubbish – which, he noticed, had accumulated there in a matter of hours – and the first thing he noticed was the clumsy way the bag had been rifled through, the zip not even fully closed again to hide the evidence.
"You went through my things!" Botan cried, glaring across the room at Inuyusha.
Hiei quickly located the velvet drawstring bag full of hiruiseki, sitting down on the floor and emptying the contents onto his thighs. As he quickly counted the stones, returning them to the bag as he did so, the ferry girl knelt down at his side and began checking the contents of her bag, her breathing increasing as she did so. As Hiei reached the seventy-fifth stone and released a sigh of relief, the ferry girl shot to her feet and spun around to face Inuyusha again.
"Where is all my underwear?" she demanded.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Inuyusha replied.
"All my underwear is gone!" she ranted. "I had four bras and several pairs of panties in that bag and now they're all gone! Where are they?"
Inuyusha started to make up a pathetic excuse for why he had taken the girl's underwear that did not involve him being a filthy old pervert, but Hiei could not be bothered to listen to it. He stuffed the sack of money back into the bag and closed it over, securing the bag over his back as he had on his way to Inugoya.
"Forget about it," he said to Botan.
"How can I forget about it?" she cried, turning her irate face to him. "I now don't have a clean change of underwear! What if I get hit by a bus?"
Hiei frowned.
"Then you'll die," he said.
"Yes!" she said. "That's right! I'll die!"
"I don't see how a fresh pair of panties would change that," Hiei said.
"I don't want to die in dirty underwear, Hiei!" she wailed. "When they take my dead body to the hospital and they check to confirm my death, they'll see the sweat stains on my underwear! I can't die that way, Hiei, I can't!"
Hiei tried to give her the most condescending look he possibly could, but the effort was ineffective as she lost none of her vigour.
"Give me back my underwear!" she yelled at Inuyusha.
"You know young lady, I believe you have misunderstood the old saying about not wanting to get hit by a bus," he replied. "The correct sentiment is that you do not wish to be hospitalised – just hospitalised, not killed – whilst wearing mismatching underwear. It matters not if the underwear is not clean."
"Of course you would say that, the last time you put on clean underwear the dinosaurs were still parading around the living world!" Botan replied.
"The point is, your underwear just has to match," Inuyusha insisted. "Now when you were over here pushing yourself at me I could see that you are currently wearing a pink bra with a frilly trim, so we just need to check that your panties are also like that and you should be just fine."
Botan started to yell back at him but her words dissolved into a scream of fear and she almost leapt into Hiei's arms as Inuyusha stood up.
"Stay away from me you dirty old man!" she yelped.
Inuyusha grinned and Hiei felt his stomach churn again.
"You take one step closer to my wife and I'll make you suffer in ways you never imagined possible," Hiei warned him.
Inuyusha sighed and sat back down; though he did not appear at all afraid of Hiei carrying out his threat.
"Good luck on your journey, Hiei," he said instead. "I hope you find the answers you seek."
Hiei sneered at Inuyusha and then turned his attention to Botan.
"Let's go," he said to her.
"Right," she agreed.
Hiei took one last look over at the disgusting disgrace that had somehow managed to seduce an ice maiden before gladly taking his leave.
As they moved through the village of the dog demons, Botan eyed the lines of airing laundry suspiciously, half-expecting to see one of her bras pinned to one of the lines. Her already generally negative opinion of the dog demons had been thoroughly cemented after Inuyusha's heinous act of taking a ferry girl's underwear. She now fully understood why Inukasai was such a slimy, passive-aggressive creep: growing up in a village of unhygienic, inbred, lecherous beasts had surely made him the way he was.
Maybe this was yet another argument in favour of the nature versus nurture argument Koenma had spoken of, she thought darkly. Maybe she should write a report about it all. She felt that she ought to at least write down what had happened so far, if only because she doubted even she would believe it all afterwards.
As she and Hiei neared the periphery of the village and Inukasai stepped into their path, Botan had to bite back the urge to tell him how much she really hated him and everything about his life.
"Before you go, there is just one thing I would like to say to you, if you would be so kind as to spare me a moment of your time."
Botan and Hiei both stopped walking and Botan folded her arms and glared at Inukasai.
"Make it quick, I've wasted enough of my time in this place," Hiei replied. "And I'll need a few hours to scrub out the stench of this village from my being once I'm gone, so I have to factor that into my plans too."
Inukasai smiled tightly.
"Hiei, I know what you are going through," he said. "I understand your ire, your frustration and your need for answers. I can help you."
"You can't even help yourself!" Botan snapped.
Inukasai gave her a long look. A long, uncomfortable look. She started to feel her anger turn into concern and a hint of apprehension.
"I know that demon world as a whole – not just the ice village – would have you believe that being an emiko makes you something lesser than everyone else in this world," Inukasai said as he finally moved his attention back to Hiei. "But it does not have to be that way. You can be whatever you want to be, you do not have to compromise. I have a life far away from the one the elders of the ice village condemned me to when they cast me out, and you can too. Hiei, I have to be honest with you: I believe that you can be better than you are right now, you are just not trying very hard. For example, look at your wife: she is a mouthy, obnoxious nag, she holds one of the lowest-ranking positions in spirit world and she is an affront to you and everything you could be."
Botan wanted to be offended by Inukasai's cutting words, but she was mostly just distraught by them.
"Send her away – surely she has human souls she ought to be collecting anyway – and let me come with you on your quest," he continued. "I know where the ice village is, and though it is far from here, the two of us, with our speed and endurance, could reach it within a day. Your wife will slow you down and she most definitely will not be welcomed into the ice village – not that I am saying we will be, but at least we are strong enough not to be overcome by the cold – and I know which of the ice maidens will talk and which ones will not. I can help you find your mother, Hiei, but I cannot give you much of my time, not when my wife is so close to giving birth. If it is just you and me it will be fine, but I have neither the time nor the patience to waste dragging your burden of a wife with us."
"You know nothing of my plans or where I am going," Hiei quietly replied. "Take your misplaced pity and direct it somewhere it's truly required: like at your own miserable life."
"I appreciate that you are angry, Hiei, but–"
"And don't ever call my wife a burden again. If you want to know what the definition of the word burden is, stick around here and watch closely to the sort of child your wife gives you."
Hiei grabbed Botan's hand – though she noticed that this time he did at least grab the underside of her hand in a way that was almost the correct way to hold hands with someone – and straightened his back.
"I would kill you, but you will suffer more if I let you continue with this charade you call a life," he said. "Now get out of my way."
Hiei started to walk around Inukasai and Botan was forced to follow him as he was still clutching her hand in his. She stumbled after him, sticking out her tongue at Inukasai as she passed him. She watched him over her shoulder, seeing that he turned on the spot and stood alone at the edge of the village, watching them go with an almost forlorn look on his face. When the path beneath her feet became rocky and uneven, Botan turned her attention forwards again, concentrating on where she was putting her feet.
"How long will it really take us to get to the ice village, Hiei?" she asked as they walked.
When Hiei did not answer her after several moments of stumbling over the uneven path and trying to ignore the sheer drop at her side, Botan glanced at Hiei, finding him watching her from the corner of his eye, looking deeply unimpressed.
"I can fly," she offered. "I'll tie my bag to my oar so you don't have to carry it. I'm much faster when I fly, you know that. I bet we could still make it there within a day."
Botan hoped that they could still make it to the ice village within a day. The sky overhead told her it was evening already and it would soon be dark, marking the end of Saturday. Assuming they set up camp somewhere in the mountains and set out the next morning, they would probably not arrive at the ice village until some time on Monday, and by the time they had rested and then visited the ice maidens, it might be into Tuesday, and that left little time to report back to Yukina and Inukasai that the two could not possibly be related before Botan would be obliged to return to spirit world.
"We're not actually going to the ice village, you idiot," Hiei growled in a low voice.
"You said we were!" Botan replied. "And don't call me an idiot, it's not proper for a husband to speak to his wife that way!"
"We're not actually husband and wife!" Hiei snapped.
"But we're pretending to be, and if you don't maintain the act, Inukasai will see through it!" Botan argued.
"We've left Inugoya, Inukasai isn't around any more, we don't have to pretend anything now!"
"Oh really?"
"Yes really, so stop calling me your husband!"
"If we're not pretending any more why are you still holding my hand?"
Hiei stopped walking so abruptly Botan only realised that he had stopped when she was jarred to a halt as her hand caught on his. She turned around, a few steps further down the path, her left arm outstretched towards Hiei, whose right arm was outstretched towards her, their hands suspended in the air between them, still locked together. Botan purposefully looked down at their hands before looking up at Hiei expectantly, finding him looking at her with that strange look on his face again.
"Are you okay, Hiei?" she asked.
He did not look okay, but he rapidly shook his head, literally shaking his expression off and gaining a look of irritation.
"Inukasai was right about one thing," he said. "Shouldn't you be back in spirit world collecting dead humans for Koenma?"
"I'm not leaving until we fix this mess, Hiei!" she replied.
"There is no fixing this mess, ferry girl."
"Yes there is! Don't you remember why we came here in the first place?"
"Yes, I do. We came here because you failed to bring me any useful information from spirit world."
"That wasn't why! We came here because we need to find proof that Inukasai isn't Hina's son and he isn't Yukina's brother! Those dogs weren't any help, but it seems like we might be able to get proof from the ice village, so let's stop arguing and let's get moving!"
Botan yelped involuntarily as Hiei yanked back on her hand, forcing her to stagger two steps closer to him, her feet barely managing to stop before they stood on his.
"We are not going to the ice village, woman," he said, his voice low as though as he was afraid someone might overhear his words. "I am taking you back to the nearest portal to the living world, and you are going home."
"But Hiei, what about Yukina?" Botan asked. "You can't just let her carry on thinking that faker is her brother! He has to be stopped!"
Hiei sighed and, as he had not argued her point, Botan decided to push her luck a little further.
"We should go to the ice village and see what we can find out about the other emikos born," she said. "Now that we know Inukasai is seventy-eight years old and we know that he was the eighth emiko born, we can use that information to find out which one of the ice maidens is his real mother."
"Inukasai's real mother is most likely dead," Hiei flatly replied.
"But if we can get her name, that's all we need!" Botan insisted. "Just something so that we can prove that Hina was not his mother as he currently thinks!"
Hiei glanced over the edge of the path and Botan briefly worried that he was considering hurling her over the edge in his frustration.
"Inuyusha said the ice maiden he fornicated with was called Hina."
Hiei's eyes were still looking out over the edge of the path and his voice had been barely audible, leaving Botan wondering why he had even said what he had.
"You don't think…?" she asked, unable to actually finish the question, though knowing by the look on Hiei's face that she did not need to.
"I don't know what to think right now," he grumbled. "And you're nagging isn't helping that…"
"But Hiei, you know Hina is your mother," Botan insisted. "That's what they told you when you went to the ice village, wasn't it?"
Hiei slowly met Botan's eyes, the look on his face making her suddenly very afraid.
"How do I know the ice maiden I spoke to didn't think I was Inukasai when I went to the ice village?" he asked.
"Because any idiot can see that you're not!" Botan replied.
"Mukuro couldn't even tell us apart," Hiei said, sounding suddenly sad. "It doesn't matter what an emiko's mother or father look like or what sort of demon his father is, we all end up looking like I do. That's one thing I learned in the ice village. We all look like me. And Inukasai."
"But Inukasai only looks like you on a superficial level! Just because he has the same colouring as you, the same hairstyle and – rather oddly – the same fashion sense, doesn't make him identical to you!"
"No, it doesn't. He turned into someone Yukina is happy to have as her brother."
"That's not what I meant!"
"Hn."
Hiei closed his eyes and smiled.
"You know ferry girl, you're the only person who seems to think Inukasai and I are not identical," he said.
"But you're not!" Botan insisted. "You know you're not!"
Hiei opened his eyes again and again Botan found the look on his face unsettling.
"I obviously can't see what you can," he said quietly.
"Well, trust me, you're not identical!" Botan said.
"Right," Hiei said with a nod of his head. "I'm the same height as the grill and Inukasai can clearly see over the top of it."
"I… I don't know what that means, but Hiei, we have to fight this!"
"Do you have another brilliant plan?"
"Yes, I do!"
"Is it as brilliant as you plan that took us to the fetid village of Inugoya and saw us waste a day in bad company and mostly in a prison cell?"
Botan pouted at Hiei but he remained impassive and so she pressed on.
"We go to the ice village," she began. "And there we–"
"At the speed you move at, it will take us days to get there," Hiei cut her off. "And we won't learn anything new there. You don't know what the ice maidens are like. You're wasting your time and mine."
"It's not a waste of time if we fix this! You said yourself that you learned some things about yourself when you went there, maybe if we talk to different people or ask different questions we can find out something new!"
"I learned three things about myself when I was there."
"Well there you go: three things isn't a lot, surely we can learn more!"
"I learned that all emikos look the same."
"Not exactly the same."
"I learned that I'm a bastard."
"That's not true."
"A literal bastard."
"Well… That is a little harsh, but I suppose it's true…"
"And I learned that I'm infertile."
Botan opened her mouth, though she could not be sure if it was because she had been about to say something or if it was just an expression of her shock at Hiei's last statement. He released her hand and continued down the mountain path, but she remained where she was for some time as she tried to fathom what he had just said. It seemed very odd that such a subject would have been raised when he had visited the ice village and she wondered who had brought it up: Hiei or the ice maidens. She had never thought of Hiei being a father or even wanting to be a father, but maybe part of his anger and insecurities were related to the fact that he could never have his own children.
"Hey, wait a minute!" she said, turning around and summoning her oar. "Hiei!"
She leapt onto her oar and raced after him, slowly as she reached his side, but remaining on her oar.
"How would the ice maidens know that about you?" she asked. "They can't know that about you!"
"It's the one saving grace of the evil emikos: they can't procreate," Hiei flatly replied, keeping his head forward and never breaking stride as he spoke.
"Well that makes even less sense if it doesn't just apply to you!" Botan argued. "If it applies to all emikos, it would apply to Inukasai, but obviously he's not infertile because his wife is pregnant!"
"His wife is pregnant because she rutted with his father," Hiei replied.
"What?" Botan yelped.
"She was impregnated by Inukasai's father," Hiei repeated. "Who is also her father. And her uncle."
"Urgh!"
Botan struggled to stay airborne as she tried to picture the tangled mess that Inukasai's family tree must look like. As the reached the identity of his wife's unborn child, another idea occurred to her.
"But back in the village, you said the child his wife was having would be a burden for him," she pointed out. "I thought you were saying that because you meant that it would be born emiko or part emiko."
"No, that's not what I meant," Hiei replied. "I meant that the baby will be born one hundred percent dog demon, and as the kid matures it will become increasingly apparent that it bears no resemblance to Inukasai."
"I see… Still, there is just one more thing I don't understand."
"There's nothing difficult about it. He's infertile and she's a dirty whore."
"Maybe she deliberately got pregnant by someone else so as not to hurt his feelings by letting him find out that he couldn't father children of his own."
Hiei turned to glare at Botan in a way that made her instinctively swerve away from him, flying over the steep drop rather than the path so that she was both beyond arm (and sword) length from him and in a position that was too dangerous for him to attempt jumping at her.
"You're not helping," he warned her.
"I'm sorry, I only said it because it was the sort of thing I might have done were I in her shoes," Botan explained. "But, when I think about it, when I think about how those dog demons all behaved, you're probably right. But there is still one thing I need to ask you."
"There's only one question you need to ask me, and the answer is yes."
Botan frowned, touching a finger to her chin and eying Hiei curiously.
"I don't think you know the question I was going to ask," she said slowly.
To her amazement, a brief look of panic passed over Hiei's face; though it was only fleeting, and he quickly returned to the tense and irritated scowl he had been wearing since telling her about his fate as an emiko.
"The question I need to ask can't be answered with a yes or a no," Botan added.
"The question you need to ask is if I am taking you back to a portal out of this world, and the answer is yes," Hiei replied.
"The question I need to ask is why did the ice maidens tell you that you were infertile and not Inukasai?" Botan blurted out.
When Hiei gave her an almost admonishing look, she realised that her question had probably sounded odd, and so she attempted to justify it.
"It just seems like a strange thing for the ice maidens to have discussed with you," she said. "Especially if they didn't also discuss it with Inukasai – which they can't have done, or he would have mentioned it being wrong or that he thought he had overcome it because his wife is now pregnant – you know how he loves to brag, if he had been told he couldn't be a father, he's be bragging now that he had managed it anyway. And seeing how much Inukasai likes to talk about his disgusting family, I'm almost certain he would have mentioned to the ice maidens that he had a wife and was starting a family of his own, so surely at that point they would have told him that he couldn't. Why didn't they tell him? They told you. Did they just tell you? Why did they tell you? Was it just a part of the facts they told you or did it come up in conversation somehow? And if it came up in conversation, why didn't it also come up in the conversation Inukasai had with–"
"Botan, shut the hell up!"
Botan yelped and swerved further away from the mountain path, clutching one hand to her oar and the other to her chest. Her action was largely unnecessary as Hiei did not so much as look at her as he barked out his irate response, but he had quickened his pace and she could feel that his demon energy had risen as though he had been about to launch an attack; though perhaps it was just a side effect of his rise in temper, she thought to herself.
He seemed to be suddenly and unreasonably angry.
Botan knew that, given that Hiei was literally stomping down the rocky path, his cloak fluttering at his sides from the waves of demon energy radiating off of him, she really ought to leave well alone and let the matter drop: but her curiosity was at an all-time high, and she had never been able to contain her need for answers. After all, of everything that had happened, of everything that Inukasai had said and done and of everything that Hiei had been through in the past few days, why was talking about his apparent inability to father children the one point he was getting so edgy talking about? Were it Inukasai responding that way, it would make more sense, as he was the one with an illogically pregnant wife. Why did Hiei care that he could not have a family? He had already admitted that he had never been married or had a serious girlfriend, and he had always given Botan the impression that he despised children and harboured no desire to have any of his own.
Then, as if from nowhere, the missing link appeared in Botan's head and left her mouth as soon as it did so, despite her knowing she should not have voiced it the moment she had finished doing so.
"You asked the ice maidens about it."
Hiei's silence and the breif crackle of black flame around his right arm was really all the confirmation Botan needed to know that her assumption was correct. At first she nodded, feeling that she finally had an understanding of the situation: but then she faltered, her eyes growing wide and her lips twitching as she realised that, in fact, she had even less understanding of the situation than before. Knowing that Hiei had asked the ice maidens a question that Inukasai had not explained how he knew something that his fellow emiko did not, but it still did not explain why Hiei would ask such a question and Inukasai would not.
Botan started to wonder how and why Hiei had asked. Had he been trying to father a child and failed? Had he wanted to have children, but feared they would be born the same as he had been, and so had asked to find out how to handle a baby emiko? Why had Inukasai – with his pregnant wife – not asked those sorts of questions?
Botan flew closer to the path again, watching Hiei carefully as she did so. He was still walking briskly, his fists were still clenched at his sides, he was still fired up – almost literally – and his head was still tilted downwards, his eyes mostly obscured beneath his hair, his jaw was still squared as though he was tightly clenching his teeth together and his lips were still formed into a sneer.
"I'm coming with you, Hiei."
Botan waited for Hiei to tell her that she had to leave demon world. She waited for him to tell her that she had misunderstood his plans, that he did not intend to go back to the ice village. She waited for him to call her a name or tell her to leave him alone. It took a few minutes of travelling on before he finally did answer her, and the answer he gave was not one she had expected, given that he was clearly still angry that she had made him mention something he was not at all comfortable talking about.
"At the end of this path we move east, in the opposite direction of the cave we stayed in last night. A mile beyond the divide in the path we will reach a grassy plateau in the hills. It should be a good place for you to set up your stupid tent. We leave at daybreak."
Next Chapter: Hiei and Botan head out for the ice village together, and along the way they find that their conversations always come back to one subject: love and romance. Chapter 9 – The Long Road Home
