A/N: I don't own Yu Yu Hakusho or any of the characters herein, they are all the property of Yoshihiro Togashi.

And, although they are not specifically referenced, they did heavily influence the first chunk of this chapter, so:
I Want Love by Elton John
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Recap: (I don't think very much happened… Again…) But basically, things got hot(ter) and heavy(ier) between Hiei and Botan and Yusuke and Kurama reached the periphery of Tarukane's mansion in their bid to rescue Yukina.

Chapter 14: Hard to Believe

For the first time since before the invasion of the living world by the Makai insects, Botan felt totally relaxed and completely at peace. She and Hiei were both naked and they were pressed up against each other, and it felt right. It was the definition of demon world love personified, and perhaps it was almost the same as plain old lust, but regardless of what else it could or could not be likened to, it was definitely right, and it was something that was definitely worthy of being called love.

It was a different kind of love, but it was definitely love.

Through the communicator she could hear Koenma and George commentating on Yusuke and Kurama's progress through Tarukane's mansion. She never had managed to return a picture to the giant mirror, but by wiring her communicator to the mirror's controls, she had somehow managed to create a bugging device for any spirit world communicator, including the one Yusuke carried and the one in Koenma's office. She knew that Hiei was listening for the moment Koenma despatched the Special Defence Force to open a breach in the barrier around the city, at which point they would have to flee as quickly as they could.

She hoped the city was not destroyed, as she did not like the idea of the citizens within it all being killed needlessly and she was also worried about exactly how she and Hiei would get past the Special Defence Force and out of the breach without being stopped or shot down. It was imperative that they did make it out though, as Botan suspected that Yukina's freedom might depend on Hiei assisting Yusuke and Kurama at some point.

But, most of all, Botan wondered what Hiei would do once they had ensured Yukina's safety.

She slowly sat up, and she was not entirely surprised when he sat up behind her, keeping his chest pressed against her back. Because of his position, he was just beyond the periphery of her vision, and only if she turned her head could she see the peaked wisps of his blue-black hair over her shoulder.

"We ferry girls aren't ever supposed to want something for ourselves," she said slowly, looking down at her own hands. "So if I do now want something for myself, what do you think that means? Does it mean that I've been a human for too long? Will it stop when I lose this body? Or does it mean that I've become corrupted somehow and that I'm beyond repair?"

"Hn, you think too much," Hiei muttered into her shoulder.

She paused until her body settled down from the initial thrill of feeling the warmth of his breath against her bare skin.

"But I've never wanted anything for myself before now," she insisted. "And now I do. I want it so badly I almost feel angry knowing that I probably won't get it. Have you ever felt that way about anything?"

"Hn."

When Hiei said no more after what seemed like a reasonable wait for him to respond Botan sighed emphatically.

"That was a silly question, wasn't it?" she said, smiling wryly. "Of course you've never wanted something you've been unable to get. You said yourself: here in demon world, you just take something when you want it. There's no longing, no waiting, no uncertainty."

"I want love."

Botan froze. Had she heard correctly?

"But it's impossible."

"I, uh…"

Botan was, once more, speechless. She was sure that Hiei was the only soul she had ever encountered with the ability to leave her that way.

"I'm reckless and irresponsible," Hiei continued. "And I'm dead in places other souls feel alive and free."

"I thought you… Didn't believe in love, per se," Botan said slowly. "You just want demon world loving, right?"

"It's the only type of love I've ever known," he replied. "I can't love any other way. I don't feel enough to love any other way."

"Do you want…?"

Botan could not make herself finish her question, but she desperately wanted to know if Hiei did, on a deeper, repressed level, believe in and perhaps even want to love in a more traditional, romantic way – the way she wanted to love him.

"Your way of loving is all about feeling, and I don't feel anything," he said.

"May-maybe you do feel something," she tried. "Maybe you just don't know how to express yourself because you've never been given that opportunity."

"I'm scarred in more places than you can see with your eyes, ferry girl," he replied.

"What do you mean?"

"The oldest and deepest of my scars are around what's left of my heart, and over time they just get deeper and tougher. One day they will consume me completely, and I welcome that moment."

"Welcome it? You're troubled by feelings you don't understand then? A part of you does want love, but because you don't understand it and you have abandonment and trust issues, you're troubled by that desire?"

Botan felt like she was grasping at straws and she hoped that it was not obvious in her voice.

"I do want love," Hiei replied, making her smile optimistically. "Just a different kind."

Botan's smile vanished.

"I don't want the sort of love that you do," he continued. "I don't want to be broken down, closed in, tied down and committed eternally. I want the sort of love that doesn't mean anything. It's love on my terms. After everything I've learned in my life, I know that it's the only kind of love I can enjoy. Do you understand?"

"No!" Botan moaned. "What you're describing is heartless! How can you be contented with something so shallow? You are capable of caring Hiei, if you weren't, Yukina's current predicament wouldn't be bothering you, but it is, so you are! If you can care, you can love! The proper way!"

"I carry too much baggage," Hiei said softly. "I've seen too much hurt, betrayal and tragedy. I don't believe in love the same way your open-minded, naïve, optimistic and inexperienced heart does."

"But love is the most wonderful thing in life… It's the reason why life is superior to death!"

"It's easy for you to talk that way. You don't understand the pain of rejection, the agony of betrayal and the lasting wounds of learning that you are unloved and unwanted everywhere you turn. You believe in romance because you don't know any better. It's just a nonsense fairy tale, invented in the simple minds of fools and spread amongst the masses to inspire and encourage, but ultimately it just causes disillusionment and discontent."

"Hiei, it doesn't have to be that way…"

"I know better than you do, ferry girl. I've lived long enough and been disappointed often enough to know that it's all a lie. Clean, smooth and sweet romantic love is a lie. All that is real is the rough and ready kind we share. It's intense, it's satisfying, it's involved: but best of all, it doesn't last."

Botan wished that Hiei would stop reminding her that "demon world loving" did not last.

"It runs its course and then it just ends," she said tightly.

"Exactly," he growled, gripping her upper arms and dragging the tip of his nose against her bared back.

"What if one of us doesn't want it to end?" she asked.

His grip tightened slightly, almost to the point of being painful, and he pulled his head away from her. She wished that she could see his face to gauge his reaction to her question, but as he typically hid his true feelings behind sarcastic smirks and disparaging sneers, she doubted seeing his face then would really give her much indication of how he really felt about the question she had just asked of him.

"Which one of us doesn't want it to end?"

He had spoken so quietly, Botan had barely heard his words. She paused long enough for his whispered question to echo around her head several times before taking a breath to answer him.

"Neither of us, I suppose," she said. "We both understand that this is demon world loving, and it doesn't last. I was just thinking that maybe it might end before one of us is really ready for it to end. And what if one of us wants it to last a little bit longer? Can we just accept that it's over and move on?"

"Of course we can," he replied. "There's no deeper attachment. We move on, and we remember only the highs of the pleasure we felt when we were together. It's simple."

Botan was not so sure that it was simple, and she thought that even Hiei had a trace of doubt in his voice, but if his insistence on being unfeeling and distrusting was any indication, he would never want to commit to anything more substantial than the "love" they currently shared anyway.

"Simple," she said flatly. "Sure."

"There's an understated beauty in simplicity," he replied.

She nodded, though inside she was starting to knot up with frustration. Her entire mindset was based around eternity: she was an eternal being, of a world that was the gateway to eternal existence in the afterlife and she had always believed that love was an eternal thing. It was possible to fall in love, but it was not possible to fall out of love. And she had seen too many examples to back up that belief: countless souls of dead humans who had been betrayed, hurt and cheated by loved ones, but, despite feeling angry, disappointed and let-down, they still loved those same people. Perhaps the love was not the same, but it still existed. It never died. It was eternal. Love outlived those who felt it.

"I don't specifically remember many of the countless souls I've collected over the centuries, but I do remember some," she said quietly. "I remember the soul of a man I collected during Bakumatsu. It was a difficult time in the living world, and he was a man who had held a position of power throughout the many changes there had been. He was about 65 years old, which was quite a good age for a human to reach in those days in such a turbulent time. He had outlived his wife by almost 40 years, and he had never remarried. He loved her. He fell in love with her the day he met her, he married her very quickly, and he only spent about four of his 65 years with her, but he still loved her. He said he could never love anyone else. She was the only one for him."

"Why are you telling me this?" Hiei asked tightly.

"I asked him if he was looking forward to being reunited with his wife in the afterlife," Botan continued, ignoring Hiei's question. "He said he would never see her again, because he didn't want to impede on her happiness."

"…This story is getting increasingly pointless."

"She had always been in love with someone else. She only married him for his money, and she continued an affair behind his back. He said he knew that, in the afterlife, she would be with her lover, because he had taken his own life shortly after she had died in order that they could be together in the afterlife because social circumstances had kept them apart in the living world."

"…Hn, pointless. They should have just indulged in demon world loving and all moved on with their lives."

"He said he had been driven to madness, because he often saw shadows in the hills when there was a full moon, and he was sure that they were his wife and her lover dancing."

"So he really was an idiot?"

Botan sighed.

"It was the most romantic thing I've ever heard," she said.

"That's your definition of romance?" Hiei spat. "That's stupid! His wife was a slut and he was a fool!"

"Not the man and his wife," Botan groaned. "The wife and her lover. Had they been born even just one hundred years later, it wouldn't have mattered that they were penniless, they could have married without consequence. But because of the time period they were born in, she was made to marry a rich man for the sake of her family. She was denied happiness with the one she truly loved, and she died of a broken heart. The thought of their spirits dancing in the moonlight forever more is so wonderful. It's free and beautiful and romantic."

"And stupid."

Botan sighed.

"I did pity the man whose soul I was ferrying," she conceded. "Because he genuinely loved that woman, and it seemed as though she had grown to resent him for her predicament, even though it was not his fault and he had always been kind to her."

"Kind…"

Botan looked back over her shoulder and Hiei lifted his eyes to meet hers.

"Does nothing ever move you, Hiei?" she asked.

"No," he instantly replied. "I already told you that my heart is not the sort that cares for such nonsense."

"In that case there isn't a problem."

Botan turned her head away and looked up at the broken mirror. Hiei did not ask her to explain and so she did not bother: but simply she had been referring to the fact that she had been growing attached to him, and the thought of losing him had started to bother her, but now that she knew that he would never care for her or love her back, losing him did not seem so terrible.

It was unfortunate that he did not understand true love, she thought, because between his passionate approach to life and his prowess as a lover in the physical sense, he would have made the most perfect life partner imaginable.

But, she supposed, everyone had their faults. And romantic love like the kind she had just tried to explain to Hiei was harder to find in modern times: perhaps it was not something that existed any more. Perhaps she was the one who was wrong, her ideas outdated, because there were no others left alive who believed in romance, destiny, sweetness and true love.

Kuwabara awoke with a start, barely managing to cover his head with his arms before Shizuru caught him with the backswing of the pillow she was beating him about the head with.

"I'm awake!" he protested.

"About time!" she sighed, throwing the pillow at him. "You've been sleeping in all week, if you keep this up, you'll take ill when you have to go back to school!"

"Yeah, yeah…" he groaned, pushing aside the pillow and sitting up. "I was having a dream, actually."

"I don't care," Shizuru sighed, yanking open the blinds over his bedroom window.

He squinted and shielded his eyes from the glare of the sunlight with one hand.

"About a really pretty girl," he added.

Shizuru muttered a filthy remark about perverse dreams and ruined bedsheets before leaving the room.

"It wasn't like that, Shizuru!" Kuwabara yelled after her.

He sighed, pushing his sheets aside and standing out of his bed. It had been an alarmingly clear dream, and had the girl not been so stunningly beautiful and had such bizarre colouring he would have thought that she was yet another ghost invading his dreams and reaching out to him because of his psychic powers. She had been locked up in a small room at the top of a tower, with bars on the window and only a single chair to sit on, no bed to lie on and a disconcerting pile of straw by one corner of the room that he suspected she was meant to use as a bathroom. She was very sad, but she was afraid to cry for some reason, and she was even more afraid of someone Kuwabara had not seen in his dream, but through the girl's thoughts he had been aware was a cruel man.

And when he thought about it a little more, he realised that he even knew what the girl's name was: but surely she had not been a ghost trying to communicate with him?

Kurama stopped suddenly, his senses picking up on something almost too terrible to believe. Yusuke stumbled awkwardly before stopping a few steps ahead of him and pivoting around to give him a questioning look.

"Everything okay, fox boy?" he called back.

Kurama, who was secretly starting to tire of the moniker "fox boy", gave a small shake of his head.

"For a brief moment I was sure I sensed a certain presence in the depths of this manse," he said quietly. "A duo Hiei and I are familiar with only through hearsay. I cannot fathom them having any sort of connection to a human crime lord, but I also cannot deny what I felt."

Yusuke's eyebrows lowered until his eyes were cast into shadow and then they twisted at alternate angles. Kurama paused long enough to realise that the look on Yusuke's face was one of perplexity before containing a sigh and repeating himself in cruder terms.

"I thought I sensed a pair of very powerful and dangerous demons who have a bad reputation," he said. "I can't understand why they would be here, as they grossly outrank the calibre of demons we have encountered thus far, but if I am correct, we face a very difficult battle for Yukina's freedom."

Yusuke nodded.

"Okay," he called back. "Got a bit mystical in the middle part again though…" he added under his breath.

Kurama did not bother reminding him that demon ears – or, more especially, fox demon ears – missed nothing, since he suspected that telling Yusuke as much would only invite questions on which parts of him were human and which were demon: which was arguably the most complex subject Kurama could think of attempting to explain to anyone, least of all to someone with such a short attention span.

"We should proceed with the utmost of caution," he instead said, moving on to join Yusuke.

"What sort of demons are they?" Yusuke asked as they continued on together.

"The very worst sort," Kurama quietly replied.

"And that is?" Yusuke pressed.

"Former humans."

Botan chewed at her lip as all nine officers of the Special Defence Force began sounding off, their clipped responses to Koenma's roll call punctuating the air around the watchtower and making her flinch every time they spoke. After hearing all nine officers individually confirm their presence, Botan suddenly realised that Koenma had, somehow, against the odds, managed to convince his father to free them of their duties to rescue her, and that their arrival in the city of ghosts and apparitions would shortly become a reality.

Within a matter of hours, she would probably be back in spirit world, and that thought made her heart sink.

Botan shook her head slightly, but even physically shaking her brain did not help to rearrange her thoughts any more logically. When she had first arrived in the demon city, she had been in denial about being stuck there, and now, less than a week later, she felt the same numbness when she thought about escaping the city. In less than a week, she had gone from loathing and fearing the city of ghosts and apparitions to loving and enjoying it. She still did not know why – having a human body, the residents of the city not fearing or despising her because she was death personified or just Hiei – but she no longer cared. All that really mattered was that she did not want to go, and when the spirit world Special Defence Force arrived and found her resisting their attempts to take her back to spirit world, they were sure to arrest her whereupon she would be sentenced to a terrible and unthinkable fate of some sorts.

She gave a small shudder and tried not to think about it.

But the actuality of King Enma's elite soldiers arriving in a city populated by demons who each possessed barely a fraction of Hiei's power was a worrying thought. Captain Ootake, she knew, could cut down demons far more powerful than Hiei with a single blast: he and his officers would doubtlessly slaughter anyone who stood in their way as they approached Maze Castle, regardless of motivation. Memories of the elderly demon who had sacrificed his life by the Gate of Betrayal for her and the friendly and well-meaning leopard girl who had helped her catch Hiei out with regards to his definition of love began to rise, unbidden, in her mind, and she was suddenly racked with guilt.

When the Special Defence Force arrived in the city of ghosts and apparitions, they would kill everyone there and arrest her and Hiei – and it was all her fault for going to the demon city without authorisation.

Botan stood up and paced to the other end of the room, fidgeting nervously and chewing harder at her lip until she tasted blood. Suddenly the possibility of erasure from existence – which was a possibility, given that Koenma seemingly no longer trusted her and she doubted she would be able to hide her concern for Hiei and the citizens of the city of ghosts and apparitions, which would make her look even more suspicious – was no longer the worst of her concerns. She was, frankly, far more concerned about Hiei and the residents of the city around them.

"May I enquire what your plans are when you arrive in the city of ghosts and apparitions, Captain?" she heard Koenma ask through the communicator.

"We have already cleared our plans with your father, Sir," Captain Ootake replied.

He sounded a little blunt and brusque considering who he was addressing, Botan thought to herself.

"I'd like to hear them anyway, if you don't mind," Koenma tried.

There was a short pause, during which Botan thought she might have heard someone sighing.

"We intend to broadcast a request across the city that Hiei surrenders himself," Ootake said. "We are going to inform him that his sister is being held captive in spirit world, and her freedom will depend on his unequivocal surrender. We will request that he comes to an open area and waits there for us, and we will allow him a set amount of time to do that. We will be able to monitor his progress via the tracking device he is still wearing. If we arrive in the city and find that he is concealed somewhere – especially if he is concealed in Maze Castle itself – we will simply destroy the entire city. If he does surrender himself we will arrest him and take him back here for suitable sentencing, and then we have allowed two hours to find Botan."

"Only two hours?" Koenma echoed, the tension evident in his tone.

"We should only need two hours, Lord Koenma Sir," a female officer replied. "She will no doubt hear the message we send out asking Hiei to surrender himself, so she will know that we'll be in the city, and if she has any sense, she'll get on her oar and fly up above the rooftops where we can easily spot her."

"Assuming that she's still alive, that is…" a surly male officer muttered.

"Don't talk like that!" Koenma snapped. "That's an order!"

The officer muttered something about Koenma being in no position to issue orders to a squad of soldiers answerable only to King Enma himself, but Koenma either did not hear him or tactfully chose to ignore him as he did not respond.

"We're leaving within the hour, Sir," Ootake said.

"Good," Koenma replied. "But before you go… Promise me that you'll do everything in your power to bring Botan back? She's the most efficient, kindest, sweetest and diplomatic of all the ferry girls in spirit world, and she would be a terrible loss. She may be a little scatter-brained sometimes, but her gentle and loving ways have tamed and recovered more lost souls than even I can remember. Please… I'll miss her as a ferry girl, I'll miss her as a colleague, but I'll miss her the most as a friend."

There was another brief pause, during which Botan again heard the snippy male officer muttering something supercilious about the prince of the underworld developing unhealthy, unnatural and unprofessional relationships with his own employees, and again Koenma ignored him.

"I promise to do everything that is reasonably practicable to ensure that the ferry girl Botan is returned to you alive, Sir," Ootake eventually replied.

"I suppose I can't ask for any more than that?" Koenma said, only half posing his words as a question as though he was partly already sure that they were fact.

"No Sir, you can't," Ootake flatly replied.

"Very well," Koenma said.

Koenma continued to discuss the city of ghosts and apparitions and Yusuke and Kurama's progress in rescuing Yukina with the Special Defence Force but his words were mostly drowned out and consequently forgotten about by Botan when Hiei suddenly cried out behind her. She spun around, her brain taking several seconds to make any sense out of the sight she was greeted with.

"Hiei!" she squealed as she eventually came to her senses. "Goodness Hiei! What have you done?"

She ran at him, thrusting out her arms and barely managing to hook them under his armpits before he began to slump downwards.

"Hiei?" she said, tightening her grip and trying to brace her legs beneath her as his weight began to drag her down. "Hiei! Talk to me Hiei!"

She was answered by a clatter as his sword fell to the ground and she winced as she felt tiny droplets of still-warm blood splat against her leg. She dared to peer over one shoulder at where the weapon had landed, finding the blade was mostly obscured beneath a pool of blood.

"You idiot!" she wailed, turning back to Hiei, who looked unconscious in her arms. "What were you thinking? You're so impetuous and hot-headed and volatile and… And… Stupid!"

She whimpered pitifully and her legs began to shake. For a man who was small in stature and had not a pick of fat on his body, Hiei certainly was heavy, she thought. She was sure that he was even heavier than her human body was, and as she looked down at his shoulders resting on her elbows, silently noting that they were each the size and shape of ripe melons, she realised why that was: apparently that old saying about muscle weighing more than fat was true. Reluctantly she bent over and lowered her arms and Hiei to the ground, carefully laying him down onto his back. She moved to one side of him and dropped to her knees, gulping apprehensively as her knees landed in more blood.

"Oh Hiei…" she muttered.

He grunted something and her head snapped around, her eyes fixing onto his face. He opened his eyes and clenched his teeth, looking suddenly quite animalistic in his determination. He sat up, grabbing a handful of her dress by her back to steady himself as he tried to reach for his sword with his other hand.

"Hiei, no!" she said sternly, grabbing his wrist with both of her hands. "I'm not going to let you mutilate yourself! Not if you won't at least tell me why!"

He growled and yanked his arm out of her grasp. She met his eyes, feeling quite confident despite the distinct glow of rage building around his flaming red irises.

"You heard what the bastard prince said, ferry girl," he growled. "They will kill both of us and everyone in this city if we don't surrender to them."

"…So this is your way of surrendering?" Botan asked flatly, pointing at the frankly brutal wound he hand inflicted upon himself just below his right knee.

"You said the only way to get it off was by amputation," Hiei replied, talking to her in a tone that made it seem as though she was the one behaving irrationally.

"You're going to cut off your leg?" she yelped. "But why?"

"Because if I can get the tracking device out into the woods, away from the city, those stupid soldiers will go there looking for me, and, while they are distracted with that, we can get ourselves – and the rest of the citizens of this city – out through the breach the SDF entered through."

"You… Want the… But…?"

Botan could not even put into words how confused she was.

"I know what you're thinking, woman," he muttered, his fingers tightening around the material of her dress and bringing the sound of stitches straining at the seams to her ears. "You didn't do this. You're blaming yourself for what might happen to the residents of this city, and you shouldn't feel that way. I'm the one that's to blame. I was the one who stayed here against orders, and I was the one who drew you here. You had good intentions when you came here, you've not done anything wrong, you can't let them put you into prison."

"You… You're cutting your leg off for me?"

"Hn, you might find it hard to believe ferry girl, but we are a partnership here. And… I don't think our love has quite run its course just yet. If they arrest you or erase you from existence, that would be something of an inconvenience for me."

Botan screwed up her face but Hiei merely smirked at her in an almost kind way.

"Are you trying to turn this into a joke?" she asked, her voice barely audible as she struggled to say the words.

"I can't stand your screeching, and your moaning, and your philosophising…" he replied. "And if King Enma's band of merry men destroy this city and its inhabitants, you're going to theorise about it until the end of time itself, aren't you? You blame yourself already and it hasn't even happened yet. So let's… Let's not let it happen."

"Hiei, you don't know what you're saying," Botan insisted, shaking her head as she spoke. "The blood loss is making you irrational – I mean, it's making you more irrational than you usually are."

Hiei gave a short, dry laugh.

"I'm not going back to prison, Botan," he said quietly. "I had a plan to take over this city, but it doesn't look like it's going to be possible, so I have a new plan now. And it involves you, me and the rest of the poor fools inside this barrier escaping when the SDF come to arrest me and try to recover you."

"That's not a very well thought out plan, if you don't mind me saying so, Hiei," Botan said softly.

"Oh?" he responded, arching his eyebrows at her expectantly.

"Well, for a start, coordinating getting the entire population of this city out of one breach in the barrier will be a hellish task," she pointed out. "And, from a selfish point of view, I have to return to spirit world. I can't stay here in demon world. I don't know the first thing about how to survive here!"

"We won't be staying in demon world."

"We?"

"We have to go to the living world to make sure that the fox and the detective don't mess up rescuing Yukina. After that, I know plenty of places we can hide there."

"…We?"

Hiei looked directly into Botan's eyes, and for the first time ever, she saw him look strangely gentle and kind, and he even appeared to have a faint hint of a smile on his lips.

"I haven't finished teaching you the ways of demon world loving," he whispered, tilting his chin slightly to bring his lips closer to hers.

"I thought you had," she replied faintly.

"Oh no," he said, shaking his head slightly. "Your education has only just begun. And after that, you still have to fulfil your part of the bargain."

"My part of the… What…?"

"Once I have taught you everything I know about my definition of love, isn't it then your turn to teach me your definition of love?"

Botan made to ask him when they had made such an agreement – because she was pretty sure she would have remembered Hiei agreeing to let her educate him in the ways of romance – but a strange sound came out of her mouth and then her voice failed her. Hiei's smile became slightly more pronounced and he touched his free hand gently to her cheek, trailing his fingertips down to her chin and then steering her mouth to his. She closed her eyes on instinct and melted into him as he moulded his lips over hers flawlessly. She moaned on instinct and was silently glad that he still had a bunch of her dress fisted in one hand, as it was the one thing keeping her upright and preventing her from falling over him.

As they withdrew from each other – at a mutually understood moment, she noticed – Botan slowly opened her eyes again, smiling when she saw that Hiei was still wearing that decidedly gentle look on his face.

"Don't cut off your leg Hiei, please," she said. "We'll figure something else out."

"Can you remove the device?" he asked.

She was surprised to see and hear him ask the question so conversationally, as though he did not care either way.

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied sadly. "But I can over-ride the mortality trigger."

Hiei frowned slightly.

"I can make the device give off a signal that denotes your death," she explained. "But… Perhaps we could use that to our advantage."

Hiei nodded.

"If they think I'm dead, they won't hunt me down, they'll simply look for you," he said.

"Right, so I just need to find a way to make that communicator work again," she said, pointing over at the remains of her communication mirror. "I'll over-ride the mortality trigger at the other end of the city and then I can tell Koenma I'm stuck in the mazes of this castle. When they see that you're far from the castle and dead and I'm inside the castle, the SDF will try to get in here to find me, and we can escape through the breach they've made, and get the rest of the city out with us."

Botan smiled and nodded her head: her plan actually sounded like something that might work.

"We make a good team, you and me, Hiei," she said, half-joking.

"We make a good partnership, you and me, Botan," he replied before leaning in to kiss her again.

"We'd make a much better partnership if you weren't so damn cryptic all the time!"

Yusuke watched the back of Kurama's head, expectant of a reply, but received none. Instead, they continued sprinting down and around a spiral staircase that seemed to be leading into the bowels of Tarukane's mansion. Yusuke contemplated making a joke about another basement fight, but decided against it, since Kurama did not really seem to share his sense of humour for such things the same way Kuwabara did.

And, although he was loathed to admit it, in that moment Yusuke regretted not taking Kuwabara with them: if only because it would have been nice to have had someone a little more familiar around to share the odd joke with.

"Through those doors, Yusuke!" Kurama called back over his shoulder.

Yusuke yelped and pushed himself to move faster still as Kurama somehow managed to almost double his speed, aiming himself at a large set of red doors that seemed to be closing on them. Kurama made it through effortlessly but Yusuke barely managed to skid through them before they banged shut behind him, and a quick glance back showed an electronic lock activating, enclosing them into the domed, circular room they were now in.

Yusuke slowly turned around. Ahead of them was a large area of open floor, and at the opposite side of the room stood an imposing, tall, muscular man in dark glasses with a miniscule man with ragged hair perched on one of his shoulders. They were both human, but barely so. Behind them were five screens, each showing a different man, all of whom looked as though they were rich, arrogant and corrupt. Above the five screens was an enormous window, the same height as the screens and as wide as all five combined, and beyond it was a brightly lit room housing a few men in suits, two of whom were holding onto a girl in a pale jade kimono who was barely half their height.

"Well you got the right place, fox boy," Yusuke concluded. "And I guess once we beat these creeps the girl is ours right?"

"Don't be complacent," Kurama warned him quietly. "Those two are not all that they seem."

Yusuke rolled his eyes.

"You're always looking into the bottom of your teacup and seeing the reflection of a bow and thinking it's a snake," he said.

Kurama gave him a withering look and Yusuke himself then realised exactly how his words must have sounded.

"Botan used to say that," he defended himself. "Though I didn't like it when she said it, so why I said it now… Never mind."

Kurama arched his eyebrows expectantly and Yusuke nodded that he was ready before stepping forwards to stand alongside his new ally. Together they adopted a defensive stance and watched and waited for their latest opponent to make the first move.

Next Chapter: Tensions are high all round as Hiei and Botan continue their plan to escape the CGA as swiftly and safely as possible, Kurama and Yusuke battle the Toguro brothers and Kuwabara is troubled by yet more visions of Yukina and her dilemma. Chapter 15 – In Love With You