Plot warning! There is actually plot in this chapter!

Also early angst indicators warning

Recap: Hiei escaped a reality where he was Mukuro's lover and Kuwabara was still the same (ho-hum), he returned to his own reality where Kuwabara was still the same (ahem) and Keiko was messed up over Yusuke leaving her, and he was recaptured by the SDF and brought to Koenma, where he learnt that Botan is taking her human trial to be with Koenma and Hiei then had a little moment and scared Botan off with his rage. Again!

Chapter 10: The Common Denominator

"Well?" Mukuro asked, giving Hiei a look that made him feel like a naughty child – another unnecessary reminder of the reality he had just returned from.

"Well what?" he asked.

"You're back very quickly, so obviously the war was present in the reality you reached," she replied.

"No," he flatly replied. "But it was still the wrong reality. She wasn't with Koenma, but she wasn't with me either. I think you sent me there deliberately. You sent me to the one where I didn't refuse you. Are you still bitter about that? Because if you are, sending me there was the wrong thing to do, because it made me realise that I did the right thing by refusing you."

Mukuro turned more fully towards him and slowly stalked up to him.

"Hiei, are you telling me that I sent you to a reality with no war – again – and that you did not find out why – again?" she asked slowly.

"…Yes, but that's not the point," he replied.

"That is exactly the point, Hiei!" she snapped. "And what the hell are you wearing?"

"It's a…"

Hiei looked down at the baggy red sweater he was wearing. It did look ridiculous when he saw it in the light of Mukuro's fortress, but he had his reasons for wearing it – he had been hoping that it would have had the same effect on Botan that it had in the other reality he had visited. After all, if he could get her to realise that she was attracted to him, all his problems would be over.

"This is a very serious matter, and you're fucking it up!"

Hiei's head snapped up and he suddenly found Mukuro standing mere inches from him, leering over him in a way that warned him that she was seriously upset this time.

"I sent you back so that you could find out why this war is happening, and, despite the fact that every reality I've sent you to has been free of war – which is something that has never happened for anyone else I've sent to another reality – you've failed repeatedly to perform this simple, simple task!"

"I know why the war is happening!"

"Oh do you? Very good! Tell me why then."

"Your naïve ambassador started this war!"

"Idiot! That's not what I meant!"

"Well it's the truth! In those other realities, your last ambassador was still alive to give that speech and he stopped the war before it began!"

Mukuro's face softened and her stance relaxed. Hiei smirked at her response.

"Simple," he said.

"Is that true?" she asked. "Are you telling me that the only reason the war didn't happen in those other realities is because Hitoshi lived to deliver the speech his pathetic replacement made?"

"Exactly," he replied.

"…Really?"

"In the first reality you sent me to, Yusuke and Kurama both said that Hitoshi averted a war with a famous speech he gave. And he's dead in this reality, so there's nothing we can do about it. This is the wrong reality, that's the problem. That first reality you sent me to was the only right one."

"You selfish, short-sighted, son of a bitch."

Hiei balked.

"What?"

Mukuro flashed her teeth at him before punching him in the gut. It was a very powerful blow and especially painful because he had already taken three shots to his gut over the last few days, two of which had come that morning, and even though the wounds had healed on the surface, he was still tender there. He fell back, making no attempt to stop himself but adjusting his position so that he could land flat on his back to distribute the impact of his landing and do as little additional damage as possible.

"You're so simple-minded sometimes, Hiei," Mukuro sighed. "It disappoints me. You don't understand at all, do you? There was a common denominator in all of the other realities I sent you to. Did you notice it?"

Hiei pushed himself up onto his elbows to glare at her.

"Of course I did!" he snapped. "I'm not simple-minded, actually!"

"Really?" she sighed. "Go on then: tell me what the common denominator was."

"It was Kuwabara!" Hiei replied. "That was obvious! He was completely unaffected by all the changes! He was a pathetic loser in every variation apart from the right one, which was the first one you sent me to."

"Apart from the fact that I have no idea who Kuwabara is, can you think of any other reason why that might be the wrong answer?" Mukuro asked sarcastically.

"I'm not wrong!" Hiei snapped. "Kuwabara was the common denominator!"

He got to his feet but Mukuro immediately punched him down again.

"It was you!" she yelled. "It was you, you fool!"

"It was not!" he argued. "I admit I killed Hitoshi, but it's not my fault that the war started! I wasn't the one who made that stupid speech!"

"I wasn't talking about that," she growled. "Though since you mentioned it, yes it was your fault. You killed my ambassador for no good reason and at a time of great political unrest. In the reality where you did not kill him, the war did not happen. Therefore you are at least partially culpable for the problems of this reality. But that was not the point that I was trying to make. I was trying to tell you that you were the common denominator in the other realities that I sent you to."

Hiei slowly stood up again.

"Me?" he asked, wiping the back of one hand at one corner of his mouth where he had spat on himself at her last attack. "That doesn't make any sense! You sent me to a reality where I was a husband and father, then you sent me to a reality where I was trying to be a human and then you sent me to a reality where I was your… Um… It doesn't make any sense! I was different in every reality!"

"You would be the single biggest difference in every reality because you're the one I used the attack on!" Mukuro replied. "The attack only affects the person I use it on!"

"Well no shit!" Hiei groaned. "I was the only one who travelled to the other realities!"

"And they were your other realities! Didn't you see that?"

"Wait… What?"

"Those other realities were unique to you. Nobody else could be sent to any of those realities, because the Dividing Realities attack only sends the victim to another reality that they could have created themselves. Every place you have visited so far has been of your own doing."

Hiei paused long enough to consider what Mukuro was telling him. Although he had not bothered learning about the prevention of the demon world war in the second and third reality she had sent him to, he had at least bothered to find out why and how those realities had come about, and, although they were massively different from his own reality in many ways, they could all be traced back to one common point in his own life. In the first reality the change had happened when he had decided to save Botan from the rock beast; in the second reality the change had happened when he had decided to kiss Keiko when she had asked him to; in the third reality the change had happened when he had decided to take Mukuro as his lover when she had offered herself to him.

And strangely, those minor changes had, over many years, caused other changes that had steadily gotten bigger and more significant and ultimately resulted in the realities he had found himself in.

"The snowball effect…" he muttered aloud. "Yes, I understand now…"

Mukuro groaned and cursed, apparently frustrated about something. Hiei gave her a funny look: she had been in a bad mood all day that day, and he supposed it was because it was the wrong time of the month for her. After all, there was no other reason for her to be so moody right then.

"The fact that I have sent you to three realities, and all three were devoid of war," she began, pacing about in front of him. "Proves that you are at least partly to blame for the war itself. I tested this move on seventeen others before I tried it on you. The first twelve disappeared and never came back, but I was still perfecting the move back then. The next five visited ten realities each, making a total of 50 unique realities, and every single one, although different, still brought them to a world at war. I was planning to send you away ten times in the hope that just one of those visits might take you to a reality where demon world was not at war. Just one would have been enough for us to get the information we need to stop this madness. And now you're telling me that I've sent you to three realities and none were at war, and yet you did nothing to find out how or why that was? Instead, you ran around chasing after a ferry girl, demanding that she start having your babies. Can you understand why I'm so severely pissed off right now, Hiei?"

"…No," Hiei replied.

Mukuro began groaning and snarling out curse words that made even Hiei feel awkward to listen to.

"Why don't you just send me back?" he asked. "Send me to that first reality you sent me to. The difference there was that I saved Botan from the rock monster. So think about that when you're sending me away, because that's where I want to go to."

"For a man of great intelligence, you don't have much common sense, do you Hiei?" she replied.

"…Just send me back," he insisted.

"I can't!"

"Yes you can."

"No I can't! Do you ever listen? I have no control over where you go!"

"But you said the realities you send me to are only realities that I was able to create, right?"

"…Right…"

"So there is a chance that you could send me back to a reality that you've sent me to before?"

"…A very minute, very improbable chance, yes."

"Then do it. I'll get there eventually."

Hiei held his arms out at his sides expectantly, but Mukuro made no attempt to start charging her attack. Instead she stopped her pacing and gave him an incredulous look.

"I'm not doing this so that you can find yourself a wife, you know," she said slowly. "I am doing this because I am trying to stop what's happening here and now, I am trying to do something that will benefit our entire world and meanwhile you are just trying to get laid with a ferry girl!"

Hiei sighed. Apparently she was still bitter about him refusing her. What a bitch.

"Either way, you need to send me back to that first reality you sent me to," he said. "There was no war there, and everything else was exactly as it should be. But this time, hit me really hard. I don't want to come back."

"You idiot!" Mukuro growled quietly. "That's not how it works! You have to come back! You tried to prolong your stay in that first reality, but as you saw, your own body will eventually betray you. Your own natural defences will eventually heal the wound, no matter how badly you try to keep it open!"

"…I can prolong my stay in another reality by keeping the wound open?"

"Yes, and I know that was what you were doing the first time I sent you away, because you were gone for almost two days, and this morning you visited two new realities and returned to me, proving that when you wanted to come back here, you were perfectly able to do so!"

Hiei had no idea why it had taken him so long to heal his wound the first time around, but he had not realised that he could prolong his stay by keeping the wound open. He had assumed that the wound somehow contained the energy or force that kept him in the other reality, and that it naturally ran out after a period of time, depending on how hard Mukuro had hit him. But this just made things even better: once he reached the right reality, he could just keep cutting the wound open to stay there. He would have to avoid sleeping too much and make sure that he cut himself quite deeply because, as Mukuro had said, his own natural defences would work hard to heal any injury, but that was all minor if it meant that he could stay with his wife and son again, Yukina would be free and happy, Yusuke and Kurama would be themselves again, Keiko would not be such a bitch and Kuwabara would no longer be a whining, bearded "apprentice".

"Okay, I understand," he said. "Send me away again."

"No," Mukuro said. "I'm not wasting any more time or energy sending you away. This attack was my last attempt at finding a way to end the war peacefully, and obviously it's been a failure. Which means I'm going to have to end this war aggressively. I have another plan to stop the fighting, but it's not an ideal one. I'm going to have to kill Kurama and Yusuke."

Hiei froze, all thoughts of other realities – including the paradise one – gone from his mind as he was suddenly reminded that his own reality really was a complete disaster. He had already accepted that Botan and Yukina – and even Keiko and Kuwabara – were beyond salvation in his own reality: they had changed so much so long ago and made so many other changes over the years that there was no way of undoing what had become of them. But Hiei had still believed that the war in demon world would eventually come to a conclusion, ideally without the deaths of Kurama, Yusuke or Mukuro.

"What are you going to do?" he asked, hurrying after Mukuro as she marched off.

"Something I should have done a long time ago," she said as she stomped noisily along the hallways of her fortress. "I kept delaying this because I really thought that I could change things, that there might be another way, and I thought that my Dividing Realities was the ideal way to find out how peaceful tactics might be able to work to stop this war by finding a reality where that had been the case, but clearly I was just wasting my time. I've lost good men and women in the fighting and in my experiments, but no more. I'm taking out the leaders of our opposition. It's the only way. Without strong leadership, the other factions will crumble and fall, and this will finally be over."

"What exactly are you going to do?" Hiei demanded, quickening his pace to keep up with her.

"I'm going to call for a one hour armistice on all sides," she replied, keeping her face forwards as she spoke, her features set in determination. "And while the fighting has stopped, I'm going to call Kurama and Yusuke out to talk."

"Right…"

"But we're not going to talk. I'm going to kill them."

"…You're going to call for a ceasefire and ask the generals of the armies we're fighting against to meet with you for peace talks, and then you're just going to kill them?"

"…Sort of."

"Sort of?"

Mukuro stopped abruptly and Hiei staggered a step past her, her abrupt halt taking him by surprise. He turned to look back at her expectantly, and almost wished that he had not when he saw the look on her face.

"When I say that I'm going to kill them, I don't literally mean that I will kill them with my bare hands," she said slowly. "I'm going to contain them somewhere and destroy them from a distance. There's a stretch of land between us all that is unaffected by the fighting, I intend to set a trap there and lure them to it."

"No-man's land?" Hiei asked.

"I believe that's what some people call it, yes," Mukuro agreed, crossing her arms and avoiding his eyes. "I just need some bait to get them there, then I can make it look like an accident."

"…Bait?"

Mukuro slowly met his eyes again and Hiei felt his blood run cold.

"You said that you wanted an honourable death, Hiei," she said quietly. "If you do this, you'll be bringing peace to demon world and taking out two of this world's biggest threats."

"You want me to go out into no-man's land and meet with Kurama and Yusuke so that you can kill all three of us?" Hiei asked.

Mukuro nodded.

"You were once a very close ally of both of them, more so than you were to me, as I recall," she said. "I would go myself, but I think they would be more likely to trust and accept an invitation from you. You're also the fastest demon I have left at my disposal, and you stand the best chance of getting there without being caught or killed beforehand. I would just need you to distract them for minutes."

"And what – you blow us all up?" Hiei asked sarcastically.

"Something like that, yes," she replied, much to his horror. "It's my only option. If I let this war rage on, we'll all be dead. This way the fighting will subside in the confusion. Without Kurama, Yomi will want to talk and without Yusuke, his council will be lost and directionless. It's the ideal chance to get them talking and to end the fighting."

"…And the ideal chance for you to take sole ownership of demon world…"

"That's not it at all, Hiei. If it was, I would be trying to take out Yomi. I believe Kurama and Yusuke are instrumental in forcing this war to continue longer than it needs to, and I don't know if they can be reasoned with any more, this had gone on too long… Maybe a few years ago, when this first started, maybe before it got so out of hand but not now, it's too late. This is the only way. I'm sure you understand though. They turned on you a long time ago and you've proven time and time again that you prefer violence to diplomacy. And you said that you thought your existence at it stands was pointless and that you sought an honourable death. Surely then this, for you, is an ideal solution: you get your revenge on Kurama and Yusuke for turning their backs on you, you get to prove that violence is the best answer and you get to have your honourable death."

Hiei slowly shook his head.

"What?" Mukuro asked. "Are you refusing to do this? It will take time to set this up, you've probably got a few weeks left to do anything you want to before you die."

"I can't do it," Hiei replied.

He felt as surprised as she looked at his words, but he knew that he meant them. If she had made him the very same offer the week before he would have agreed without question: as she had said herself, it was exactly the sort of closure he was looking for, in terms of confronting Kurama and Yusuke, in terms of proving that actions got better results than words and in terms of him achieving the honourable death that he had sought. But something quite significant had changed since then, and he was quite annoyed that Mukuro was expecting him to just forget about that.

"I can't leave my wife and sons," he said.

"What?" Mukuro echoed, her face scrunching up in a way that was both intimidating and highly unattractive.

"I can't leave my family," he said. "There has to be another way. Also… I don't think that killing Kurama and Yusuke will solve your problems."

"Is this you having another crisis of conscience, Hiei?" she asked. "Now? Of all times? You still can't decide whose side you're on: mine of theirs? Need I remind you that Kurama and Yusuke are also fighting against each other? Even they are not loyal to each other, they won't be loyal to you. Not any more, Hiei. It's too late. Too much has changed and this has gone on too long. It's too late for making changes. This is the only way."

"I disagree."

"I don't care what you think. I'm giving you an order to do this. Are you refusing to take orders now?"

"Yes."

It was the wrong answer as far as Mukuro was concerned, but Hiei was beyond caring. He was just as angered and disappointed with her as she was with him: really, all she had to do was send him to that paradise reality and all their problems would be solved, so why was she holding out on him now?

"Is that your final answer?" she asked darkly.

"Yes," Hiei replied.

"Then you and I are going to have a major problem."

Hiei staggered slightly when his feet touched the ground. He felt light-headed, but mostly in the sort of way he did when he had slept too much rather than because he was in any way weakened.

"How long was I in there?" he asked, glaring at a nearby medic who was offering him a bundle of clothes.

"I don't know, Sir," the medic replied. "Five days, maybe a week?"

"Fuck!" Hiei snarled, snatching his clothes from the weaker demon.

Apparently Mukuro had been really pissed off at him. They had fought, as he had expected they would, over her decision to sacrifice his life in a bid to end the war in demon world, but Hiei could not remember much after suffering a few nasty injuries from her Dividing Space attack. His body was completely recovered – which it would be after a week in a healing tank, he thought bitterly – but clearly she had left him in there longer than was necessary for him to be feeling so groggy upon coming back out.

"She did this to me deliberately," he grumbled, pulling on his pants without bothering to dry himself off first, making the task more awkward than it needed to be. "She just wasted my time so that she could set up her stupid little plan."

Hiei held up his shirt, eying it curiously before flinging it aside.

"Where's my red sweater?" he demanded.

The medic gave him a curious look and Hiei did not bother waiting to find out what he had to say on the matter.

"Forget it, it doesn't matter anyway," he said, retrieving his black shirt and roughly pulling it on over his head. "I don't take my clothes with me when I travel across realities, I'll get another one when I get back to paradise."

As he moved through the fortress, Hiei's senses began to return more fully, and he realised that he was starving and thirsty, but he did not care. Once he got back to the right reality Yukina would cook something for him and everything would be alright. He hurriedly sought out Mukuro, eventually finding her walking along the corridor outside of her own chambers, apparently on her way down to greet him.

"That was quick," she muttered as he stopped in front of her. "I didn't expect you to be up and about already. Never mind, we need to talk."

"Damn right we do," Hiei agreed.

"Come into my office–"

"No, let's just do this here and now. Send me back."

Mukuro drew in a deep breath and sighed slowly.

"I've been thinking a lot about that," she said. "And, since I gave the others ten chances to find me an answer, I'm going to grant you the same privilege."

"I only need one more chance," Hiei replied.

He was confident that his next journey would take him home – to the paradise reality.

"Well I'm giving you eight more chances," Mukuro said. "You've had two chances and you've wasted them – I'm discounting the first time I sent you to another reality because I didn't brief you beforehand – and so I'm allowing you eight more chances to get this right. If you can't find a reality without war or bring me back a better solution, I'm going to have to action my other plan, and I need you to agree that you will carry out that plan if my sending you to other realities does not work."

"Fine, I agree," Hiei agreed.

Not that it mattered, he thought to himself. He would just get back to the paradise reality and keep his wound open so that he never had to come back. Simple.

"Then let's go somewhere else–"

"Just do it right here, right now."

Mukuro gave Hiei a strange look but he ignored it.

"Get on with it," he added.

"Fine," she said. "Brace yourself."

Hiei merely smirked in response. He was finally going home and not before time. Mukuro charged up her attack as before, and, as before, he was hit with it and sent flying backwards. She had hit him a little higher up this time, the cross-mark dangerously close to his heart, but again the wound was not quite deep enough to be of serious concern to him. He flew back for some time before hitting the ground and rolling over, where he began falling down a flight of stairs. He quickly regained his senses and flipped himself over, landing at the base of the steps on his feet.

Hiei looked down at his left hand: he was not wearing a wedding ring, which was the first thing he saw that made him nervous and angry. The second sight that concerned him was the clothes he was wearing.

He was dressed in ceremonial battledress, the sort he rarely wore, and he was wearing a utility belt that was adorned with a worryingly large selection of tools.

Hiei slowly moved over to a nearby window. The roads of the border patrol were overgrown and disused, just as they were in his own reality. There were precious few personnel moving about in the yard outside the fortress, and in the distance he could see the flashes of conflict along the horizon. He was in another reality, but demon world was still at war, which meant that the Kakai Barrier was still up, Kurama and Yusuke were still his enemies, and Botan was not his wife.

"Fuck," he groaned.

Hiei had never been one to believe in luck, but he was starting to become superstitious as he found himself trapped: the only way to get back to his own reality was to heal himself, and the fastest way to do that was to get help from someone with healing powers or the appropriate remedies or to jump into one of Mukuro's healing chambers. So far, none of those options were available to him, and that meant that, until one of those options became available or until he naturally healed his wound himself, he was stuck in the reality he had been sent to. And it was not even a remotely good one.

After trying to get himself into a healing chamber – and promptly learning that half of the chambers had been destroyed somehow and the other half were all occupied – Hiei had met several other demons, from medics to higher ranking soldiers, and there was no denying what his role in this reality was. He supposed that his clothing should have been a major clue, but perhaps denial had stopped him from accepting the facts sooner: in this reality, he had somehow become the general of Mukuro's army, making him equivalent to Yusuke and Kurama in the ongoing war.

It was not a position that Mukuro had ever offered him, so he was starting to question her explanation about how the alternate realities she sent him to had come about. This was not something that he could have caused because he had never been offered the job to accept or decline it, nor had he ever even thought about asking for the job. He had felt slightly more optimistic about getting back to paradise when Mukuro had told him that the number of different realities he could meet came down to him and the choices he had made and could have made in his own life – that at least reduced the number of alternate realities from infinite to numerous – but now she had sent him somewhere that he could not explain, and, as the war was ongoing, the Kakai Barrier was up and so he had no way of going to the living world and demanding answers from anyone there.

Hiei had tried looking for Kurama and Yusuke, and his attempts had yielded the same results they did in his own reality: Kurama was impossible to find and Yusuke was concealed behind an array of conflicting energy signals. He had then tried to find a free healing chamber and failed and now he was making his way outside to the training yard, trying to ignore the way everyone he passed saluted him and called him a title he would really rather not own. He needed to get outside and find a place to be alone so that he could concentrate on looking for Yukina and Botan – and he had already decided that if he could not reach either of them, he was going to run away somewhere to nurse his wounds and try to speed his return back to his own reality.

Hiei had already accepted that this time he really might be stuck where he was for several days.

He had not encountered Mukuro yet in this reality, but he could sense that she was nearby somewhere. He could also sense that even fewer demons remained behind to guard her fortress in this reality, which was presumably a reflection on how he, as general of the army, had been pushing his own soldiers to the frontline of the war and into the other two territories. He did not even know if his method of attack and defence was any better or worse than Mukuro's methods back in his own reality. Knowing the desperate measures Mukuro was planning to go to in his own reality to end the conflict, he supposed it might be worth his time finding out if his leadership of the army worked any better, but that was a lengthy plan that would require a lot of physical and mental effort, both of which he would rather employ getting himself back to paradise rather than messing about in the wrong reality or even in his own reality.

The training yard was virtually abandoned, except for two very young A class trainee soldiers and a cleaner, which made for quite a depressing and uninspiring sight. Hiei quickly took himself as far away from them as he could get before sitting down on the ground and concentrating his efforts on locating Yukina. As always, it did not take him long to find his twin sister, and, as he had expected would be the case, she was in the ice village, in that little house that overlooked their mother's grave, and she was looking every bit as lonely and miserable as she did in his own reality. He then shifted his focus, looking for any traces of Botan, expecting that he would find her either carrying out her typical ferry girl duties around the living world or else undergoing her human trial to be with Koenma as she was doing in his own reality: after all, there was no foreseeable reason for her life to be any different from either of those two variations.

What Hiei did see was, as far as he was concerned, final proof that Mukuro had lied to him about the realities she was sending him to, because what had become of Botan in this reality could in no way be because of something he had done. In fact, what had become of Botan in this reality was so unbelievable, Hiei decided that he had to see it with his own eyes, that he had to physically go and meet with her to confirm that his jagan eye was not somehow deceiving him. And luckily going to visit her for proof was quite easy to do, even though he was in a reality where there was a Kakai Barrier and demon world was at war because Botan just so happened to be in the upper region of demon world itself.

Hiei took off out of the fortress and across Mukuro's land. He briefly thought that he was probably banned from the other two territories of demon world in this reality too, but he did not really care. If he was the general of an army that was pushing into those other two territories, he reasoned that nobody else was caring any more in this reality about a stupid ruling made too long ago. And he did not really need to enter into or even to cross over the other two territories to reach his intended destination, but he did have to traverse the wilderness that bordered Mukuro's land and led to both the upper region of demon world and, if he took a different route, Yomi's territory.

The wilderness that bordered Mukuro's territory (and, in turn, Yomi's territory) was, rather ironically, what was known as "no-man's land" in Hiei's own reality. It had always been called that by the bandits and merchants of demon world who travelled enough to have a degree of knowledge about the area, but since the war had taken hold, the name had become more widely spread, and for slightly different reasons. In Hiei's days as a thief, the name "no-man's land" had referred to the fact that none of the three rulers of demon world owned the land and nobody had a fixed resident on it because it was not an official part of any of the three territories, and so no man lived there. Since the war had begun, it had earned the title because no man who ever entered the area ever returned.

It was not known why.

But Hiei did not really care that the area was where many others had mysteriously disappeared, as passing through it made him think of only one thing: the plan Mukuro had revealed to him before she had put him into intensive care.

In his own reality, no-man's land was destined to become the place where Hiei, Kurama and Yusuke would all die.

Hiei pushed himself to run faster. He was not going to die there. Maybe someone else would, but it would not be him, because before things ever got that terrible in his own reality, he was sure that he would have managed to find his way back to the reality that he belonged in, the only right reality, the paradise reality.

Hiei could not decide if no-man's land was not a place where people disappeared in this reality or if he was simply immune to its effects, but whatever the case was, he made it clear of the wasteland and into the upper region of demon world, the one part of demon world that neither Mukuro, Yomi or even Yusuke had any claim over – not that they would want to anyway, as it was the one, albeit very small, part of demon world that was still owned and controlled by spirit world. It was the semi-permanent home of King Enma's irksome Special Defence Force soldiers and the site of the continuing struggle between the lower classes of demons and spirit world for complete ownership of a minute region of demon world that was both remote and outside of the influence of the three rulers of demon world proper. Even in the times of peace, when the Kakai Barrier had been left down after Kuwabara breaking it apart, the Special Defence Force had maintained a presence there and held their ground, keeping control of the small portion of the upper region that they had acquired.

It was the sort of place Hiei had sometimes visited as a child for amusement – watching from a distance, he had rather enjoyed seeing the lower class demons get what they deserved and equally he had taken delight in the knowledge that the spirits they fought against were the strongest that spirit world had to offer: and still they had nothing on the upper classes of demon world in terms of sheer might.

The upper region was relatively deserted and it was easy for Hiei to find the place he sought, partly because of those visits he had made there in his younger days and partly because the golden glow of the Kakai Barrier and the auras of the spirits guarding it were obvious even from a great distance away. He took himself as close to the barrier as he could get, only stopping when he reached the point that he could feel his hair reacting to the static in the air and the smell of the energy itself burning up small pockets in the air around the barrier was almost too much to bear. He then began running alongside the barrier, passing that curly haired female Special Defence Force officer, who barely gave him a second glance, presumably because she felt safe standing on the other side of the barrier, and because in this reality, she had never been sent to the living world to hunt him down like she had in his own reality.

Further along the barrier, Hiei finally found what he sought: the apparent leader of the Special Defence Force and Botan.

Hiei stopped in front of them, watching them silently as he tried to figure out what he was looking at and how it could ever possibly have come about. In the last alternate reality he had visited, Botan had told him herself that she was no fighter, but now he could see as clearly with his own eyes as he had with his jagan eye that she was a soldier of Special Defence Force.

"Oh my goodness," she said as her eyes finally landed on him. "Hiei? Is that you?"

As though to mock his entrapment within demon world as a demon, Botan casually passed through the Kakai Barrier in a way that he never could, bringing herself closer to him.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, eying him over curiously. "Aren't you the general of Mukuro's army now?"

"Apparently so, yes," he sarcastically replied. "What about you? What are you doing here?"

"I'm a soldier in the SDF now," she replied. "Or did you forget that again? Wait… You do know who I am, don't you?"

"Of course I do," Hiei replied.

"Oh really?" she asked, folding her arms and giving him a sceptical look. "Who am I then?"

"You're the mother of my children."

Next Chapter: Hiei is in for more than few surprises from SDF Botan, including a pitfall of Mukuro's Dividing Realities that she had failed to warn him about and Botan's real feelings about what happened with the rock monster and the cave. Chapter 11 – Not So Simple

A/N: There is so much exposition in this fic, it's becoming insane! Unfortunately, it's unavoidable… Anyway, hopefully this chapter will show why this fic is being told only from Hiei's POV: his bias and failure to notice a lot of obvious things going on around him are part of the charm of this fic. (Can I call this fic charming? Oh well.)

Also, just another reminder: this is angst, and it will get a lot more depressing yet…