Disclaimer: This isn't my sandbox, I'm just playing in it for a while.

Notes: I stole these prompts. You hear me? I stole them like the dirty thief that I am. This is the 10th prompt (violin) from the Lambda List at 30kisses on LJ, and I haven't properly signed up for a challenge there, I stole the list because I needed something to get my creativity going.

This chapter contains Kurama/Hiei, musician!Kurama, and my personal fanon creeping in from the side.


Hiei is sitting in a tree in Kurama's front yard, listening to him play the violin. Kurama knows he's there. The window's open. He wants Hiei to hear. Because he knows that Hiei knows what the notes drifting through the air towards him mean.

It means the fox is pissed.

He only ever plays the violin when he's pissed. Hiei asked once, and Kurama muttered something about "music soothes the savage beast" and changed the subject. The music never shows Kurama's anger - the notes are soft and lilting, as calm on the surface as Kurama himself, everything from classical to his own compositions.

But it still means he's pissed.

Hiei's getting a little pissed off, too, at himself. For whatever the hell it was he did that's got Kurama in a snit, and for caring so damn much. He tries to tell himself it's the sex, because the truth is he would really miss the sex, but it's not. There's a big Kurama-shaped empty space next to him, and it's throwing him off in everything from sparring to walking in a straight line.

And he'd like the music to stop, too. It feeds from his past, reminding him of things he'd rather not be reminded of, like lilting lullabies in the wrong key, or the perfect pitch of a drill overhead. The more recent past as well, a person he'd rather not remember being, the one that landed in a different tree on a different night with a different goal.

xxxxxxx

Hiei crouches outside the window, watching the redhead inside play the instrument tucked under his chin. His face is blank, his touch light on the strings, but he can read people, and this one is wound like a clock.

And he knows I'm here, he thinks bitterly, chopping at the vine at his feet before it can take hold. The music stops.

"I know you," he says, laying the instrument inside its case. He doesn't look up.

"We've worked together once before," Hiei affirms, standing. "I'm offering we do it again."

"As you can see, I'm not myself." His voice is utterly bland, yet Hiei can't help but feel like he's being snubbed somehow. "I don't 'work' with anyone anymore. I'm sorry you came all the way here for nothing."

"It's King Enma's vault," Hiei presses, stubbornness overriding sense. No thief, former or otherwise, can resist such a target. Sure enough, he sees interest in the gaze that's leveled at him and presses on. "There's one other, Gouki. A big dumb thug, but necessary muscle."

"The goal?"

"Whatever you can run with." He folds his hands, presses his fingers to his lips. Hiei is silent until that gaze meets his again. There's a hardness hiding behind his eyes, one Hiei wasn't expecting. As though he's just made a difficult decision that he knows he will live to regret. Hiei can't see what's so difficult about it - he'd have been murdering in the streets after five minutes of being forced to stay here.

He speaks, his tone sending a chill down Hiei's spine.

"Where do we meet?"

xxxxxx

Hiei learned later that Kurama had just been told of his mother's predicted fate - any other time, and any other target, and he'd probably have been told exactly what to do with his sword. Backwards. But the conditions had worked out, detective-inflicted injuries notwithstanding, and it had all led to this.

Hiei, crouching in a tree, watching Kurama play the violin and wondering what he was going to say when that stare finally met his again.


I talk a lot about Kurama's gaze. That's because when the animated eyes from my laptop screen are giving me the willies, it sticks with me. Go watch episodes 83-84. You'll see.