Hello again, dears. Zigg, dear, if you paid attention, (just picking) you would have noticed that I included translations on the bottom of the first chapter, in the subnotes. I probably missed doing that in the second chapter, but I probably got lazy. I do that.

Oh, yeah, hello everyone else, Kagome, being the ever constant, and I'm getting to see more of you! Hello! wave I know there are at least ten more of you that read my shit, or that have read my shit, and I want comments! If you wanna drop it, if you did drop it, then why? Come on, I'm not getting very much cooperation here, everyone likes to be told what kind of job they're doing!

Oh, yeah. And, so, I didn't have Microsoft word until yesterday (I've been using wordpad, which doesn't have a spell checker), so a lot of my grammar and spelling should be better. (I did SO badly, before, but that was hand-editing, it's really hard to not miss anything. The transition from "you" to "she" was a bitch!) Why the hell didn't you lot tell me that shit was that bad off??? Gah!

Keep reading, keep reviewing, thanks as always, throws in the rest of the usual polite shit and I'll talk to later. Saijonara.

-R.F.

Now What?

He leaves her alone for the rest of the night. She retreats to the condemned building for a few hours, storming around, throwing shit, cussing Hiei and Kurama. It doesn't even occur to her why Hiei's little cronies would want to test her, too. She assumed he was lying. So she's busy practicing punching holes in bricks every now and then. It's more satisfying than when she was normal and she just hurt her fist. The crumbling rocks make a great sound, and she listens to them fall down the stairs and echo throughout the building.

Before too long, her rage has subsided, and she's no longer eager to attack whoever happens to cross her path. After a bit more relaxation to get herself fully back, and to tame the red flares around her, she starts down the stairs to the first floor, and she crawls out the window with the big enough crack in the boards, and she starts back home.

Once home, she eats, but the rest of the day, the happy feeling of the tea in her system, combined with getting some of that rage out of her system leaves her feeling pretty good, and through the rest of the day, she stays inside or on her balcony and play around, until late evening, when she lies down for a nap and sleeps the most soundly she has in a long time.

Until she gets a kick to the ribs.

WHUMP

"URGH."

"Not so loud, idiot, you'll disturb the neighbors."

"I'd be quieter if you hadn't kicked me."

"Shut up and get up."

"You know, I'll be more inclined to help you if you're less of an asshole," Me'ran growls, reaching under her bed to pull her bra on and dragging her quilt with her to her drawers in the closet to pull her pants and a shirt back on. Another black t-shirt. She half-remembers why she's so easygoing with this. He said he was going to need her help, not long ago. That's why they were testing her, yesterday.

"Wear something white so you don't scare--"

"I'm pale enough to glow in the dark. Shut up."

He waits 'til she's dressed, and he holds out her first aid kits (She got a second one for her other leg as a gift after she got here.) and he lets her strap those to her legs.

"Are you going to wear your glasses? You didn't, last time."

"I see better in the dark without them," she says after a bit of thought. But she puts them in one of the first aid kits, anyway, and she ties her hair back, then lets Hiei grab her wrist and pull her through the streets of the city until they get well out of town, and into the woods she was ambushed in.

"Why'd we wait this long? You wanted to go a few days ago."

"I had to wait for a portal. Timespace doesn't always agree with the schedules of demon kind."

As she walks, she spots the demons, one by one, that attacked her earlier that day.

"Hardly a mark. She'd better be worth running the risk, Hiei. If she gets us caught--"

"That house has been empty for centuries before you were even born."

"That's a foolish standpoint, Jaganshi."

"'Jaganshi'?" she echoes, quirking an eyebrow.

"Shut up."

One of the demons laughs. "Doesn't she know?"

"Of course not," Hiei barks, glaring. She laughs quietly, and shakes her head.

"I couldn't care less. Hiei, I'm going home."

"No you're not," he answers, seizing her wrist and pushing her through a black hole that appeared in the air.

She pauses long enough to breathe again and tame herself before she elbows Hiei in the head. The demons around them laugh, and she punches another one in the stomach before she kicks off the non-ground and lets herself float through the weird place. She doesn't have to touch the ground, and she gets to this weird spot about halfway through.

The weird spot looks like a weird net. She looks at it confusedly for a second. She tries to move through it, but something about it doesn't let her. So, instead, she turns long ways and dives through a slat head-first. She gets through easily, and she starts to keep going.

"Healer!" Hiei barks.

"I have a name," she answers, skidding to a halt and walking back to the tangled-fishnet-thing. He and two others are standing on the other side, and all three are staring her down. Hiei's got his arms crossed.

"I know that, and until I decide I like your name better than your title, you're going to have to deal with it. You're going to have to break this thing."

"I can't," she informs him tersely. "It bends when I pull at it, but I don't have the strength to break it." She moves herself back through it, slipping through headfirst again. Hiei sighs a little, and he opens his mouth, but then she braces her feet on the bottom of the hole-thing and her back against the top of it, and she stretches and bends until the hole is open enough for all of them to get through.

"Good enough," Hiei mumbles, no longer looking annoyed. He tests out the area she's opened up with an extended hand, and looks satisfied. "We can't touch that thing," he explains while the three of them slip through the hole she's made. "Even the other demons can't even touch it quite the way you can- they go through it like a hand through steam."

"Ah," she grunts. She goes back to flying through the pseudo space towards a light that she can see.

Hiei grabs her arm and apparently has hold of something else when she gets through to the other side of the pseudo space. It's nighttime here, and the sky is deeper black than anything she's ever seen. There are stars here, too, and clouds, and she can see a moon, but it's deep red. There are trees below her, too.

She's hit with the air and smell here, and she feels a smile form across her face. Something about this place just seems so much... better than at home. It gives her the chills, but at the same time, it's wonderful. It smells like blood and corpse and water and plants and life and...

"What's with that smile, Healer?" Hiei demands snidely.

"I like this place," she says as her feet touchdown. The guy that was flying lands a little ahead of her, and he starts walking, leading the way. Hiei follows him, and she follows Hiei.

"Hn. Maybe I can leave you here."

"When I get stronger, sure," she answers, smiling again. "There's something about this place that gives me the creeps, but I'm really liking the whole... it's beautiful."

Hiei laughs quietly, and so do a couple of the other demons that hear her. They stop walking, but Hiei keeps moving. She follows Hiei, but when she gets on the other side of the demons, she sees it.

It's a castle. Or a mansion. Or some cross-breed of the two. Hiei moves to the front stoop and points.

"You first."

"You demons are impossible to kill, and you're sending the human first?"

"You're wrong on one count. We're possible to kill. You, on the other hand, are not. Every demon that's stepped up on this thing has died, and no one knows why."

She sighs and steps up onto the porch and look around, and she walks up to the door. Her arms move before she realizes it, and she looks to see why. She's holding something invisible back and it's putting up quite a fight.

"Okay. Found one. Something just tried to squash me like a bug, literally," she whines quietly, pushing one back until it breaks and leaving the other one there. She leans down to close the first aid kit on her leg (it opened due to the sudden impact jarring her whole body).

Hiei moves up onto the porch cautiously, and the other demons follow him, one by one. She touches the door with her fingertips, lightly. She saw Home Alone too many times to just grab the doorknob. Great lot of good it does. Her body is jolted by something painful, and every muscle tenses and her back begins to arch backwards as her instincts pull her away from it. Then, just as suddenly as it began, it stops, and she collapses to her knees in front of the door. "Aaaagh," she whimpers, but she gets to her feet easily, ignoring the grunts and whispers and chuckles behind her. She pushes the door open as she gets to her feet. She moves into the room, but as soon as her foot gets in, she starts falling. Hiei catches her wrist and swings her over the hole and jumps across himself after she determines that the ground isn't going to try to kill them.

"You realize there is no way I'm going to be able to take care of twelve demons, right, Hiei?"

"Why not?"

"I'm still new at this," she tells him. "We're going this way, right?"

Hiei nods and she leads the way up a set of stairs. Every other one is a trick stair, and she discovers this shortly after Hiei catches the guy-behind-him's arm to keep him from falling through. It's not such a bitch going up, but coming down's gonna be ugly.

She gets through the doorway that Hiei says leads to the vault, and she looks around. The windows are boarded shut, and it's very dark all through here. She's just waiting for some sort of ambush.

Three of the demons, including Hiei, don't wait for her to get through the hallway. How wise of the ones that stayed back. Once she gets halfway through, a sound and motion to her right scares the shit out of her, and she releases a startled scream just before a pair of teeth sink painfully into her arm. It latches on, and she swings hers into the boarded window, putting it through, and she knocks it hard on the sill until it releases her arm and falls. Moonlight streams in, and after she moves out of the light, she can see a little better. One of the demons is hurt, curled on the ground with his arms over his belly. There were eight of them against the four of them, and the one that is injured has two more to deal with. She punts one through another window, and she stomps hard on the remaining one and puts it through the floor, creating a hole about the size of a soccer ball. Hiei kills three of them, and the other two deal with their own.

"Asano's wounded. The shouakki got him," Hiei says matter-of-factly as he gestures to the demon on the floor. Me'ran pulls Asano into the window with the moonlight and she can see that he's missing a large chunk of his side. He's moaning in pain and whimpering. She checks for signs of shock, but he seems to be alright, other than the bleeding hole. He whimpers and clutches at his side, and she pulls his hand away.

"You're not that bad off," she argues, patting him roughly on the head. "You're just bleeding a lot. Give me a minute."

She's lying, but only a little. There are pieces of his intestines that were opened, so she reaches into one of the bigger wounds, pushing the intestine back in and healing it at the same time. He cries out in pain, but then he stops when she starts healing the bites.

"Ah, ah, ah, my lady," he grunts. "Thank you."

"Let go of my wrist so I can get this done with," she demands imperatively. He'd grabbed her wrist when she was pushing her fingers into the hole in his gut. He lets go, and she withdraws. He gets up slowly, then bows to her again, and he follows her the rest of the way down the hall.

When she gets another quarter of the way through, the rest of them are starting to catch up, and she hears someone scream and she looks back to see that something has fallen from the ceiling onto them. She runs over and catches the head of the net, and she rolls/flips it over so that it hits the wall and crumples to the floor harmlessly. Someone in the back helps her. She looks and sees that the net had six-inch pins and needles sticking out of it, and she scowls. "I understand wanting to kill people, but ow," she whines, looking at her hands and wiping them off on her pants. There's no blood, but it stings like hell.

It takes two more traps to reach the end of the hall. They're triggered by Me'ran, so she catches them, but she managed to get a pretty good knock to the head (one of them was a swinging hammer), and the other one broke and failed to hurt anyone, even her.

"See, I told you I'd need your help," Hiei says, giving Me'ran a sidelong leer.

"For someone that arrogant, you're awful proud to be right about predicting your need for help," she answers, looking down at him.

He crosses his arms, but he doesn't say anything, and she gets to the end of the hall. Hiei slices the lock off the vault, and he starts for it, but she catches his arm.

"It's empty. And it's probably booby-trapped as hell."

He pries it open, and she has to pull his arm away as something really heavy falls for it. Then she lets him go back to prying the door open. That was far too easy. She starts back through the hallway, ducking two sets of flying daggers (Jeez, did this guy grow up on Indiana Jones?) and going back through the door. She gets through to the second door, and she feels a tug at her ankle, and she hears a loud noise and feels the impact of herself hitting the floor. She doesn't even get a chance to cry out.

"OW!" she finally says when she sits back up.

"Hiei, I think your healer just blew up," someone reports.

"No, the healer didn't blow up, something else did, and it tried to get her," she whines, kicking the remnants of the bucket in which the explosives were once stored and pulling a bit of shrapnel out of her leg.

"Can you still walk?" Hiei calls.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Split up, I'll follow cries of pain. Make sure to scream loudly enough for me to hear, and remember that I'm human and I just had a very loud bomb go off near me, so I'm mildly deaf," she finally grumbles. "My name's Me'ran, and if you want me to check something out before you find it the fun way, call me."

She perches on one of the not-trick steps and wait. One by one, then two by two, and finally the remaining five of them separate and start searching through the house.

She gets blown up three times, she gets two holes punched in her arms, and she winds up with shrapnel all up one side of her body.

However, she also disables eight traps, finds twenty-seven more, heals twelve demons sixteen times, and manages to save all of their lives at least once, not including Hiei. He's managed to go long enough without getting hurt.

Whatever they're looking for is all split up all over the house. Eventually, they all gather back into the hall and dump whatever they don't want. There's a lot more treasure than she thought there was going to be. Hiei told her a little bit about there being some, but he doesn't say anything about it to explain.

"Is that everything?" someone asks. They all seem to agree, but Hiei doesn't. She's perched on the steps, so she's not sure what they're doing. She thinks it's like kids at Halloween, picking out what they don't want and trading for what they do. Hiei walks over and holds his hand out at her.

"They wanted to thank you."

She lets him dump it into her hand, and she looks at it and runs her thumb over it. It's too dark to see exactly what it is, so she picks it up and holds it, trying to feel it out.

"It's an earring. You only have the one."

"Oh."

"It doesn't match your other one, but it's the same color as your eyes, and it'll offer a little magical protection, though you don't need it," he explains. "I've got to keep looking," he adds, going through a door she didn't notice under the stairs.

She follows him down the stairs and through the door. It's even darker down here than it is through the rest of the house. It's cold down here, too.

"Shit," she mumbles when she steps on what has to be the eighth millionth thing in the floor. She's hoping that they're not the bones they feel like.

"Why are you following me?"

"I'm the healer, and there will be no injuring to them until someone starts a fight, and they seem to be decently close allies."

"Haven't you heard the term, 'no honor amongst thieves'?"

"Yep, and I know the term "thick as thieves", too. More familiar with that one."

He snorts.

The pair of them continue walking through the blackness. What light there is reflects off the cowl, and she follows its motion through the dark.

Then she hears him fall and sees the cowl drop. She starts to move for him, until she feels an impact to her right and staggers until her feet catch something and she falls. Whatever she landed on hurts the shit out of her knee, hip, elbow, shoulder, and palm. She turns to see there's a green glowing there, and she gasps and tries to move away from it. She hits something and she nearly falls over it. The green glowing gets closer to her, and she realizes it's alive. She pushes it back, and then she feels Hiei brush past her, and then she hears its death gurgle.

"It's ahead," Hiei says. She starts to move again, and she realizes that she's hurt. She hears herself limping more than she feels or sees it. She doesn't even think to be concerned about it, but then she realizes how much farther ahead of her Hiei is than he was before. She starts to call out to him, but hands close around her throat, and she never minds calling out and just screams.

"AAGH!"

Hiei's footsteps vanish, and the thing throws her forward. She falls over something and crawls away, and she hears and sees the sword that is knocked out of Hiei's hands. She picks it up. She doesn't have time to think too much on it. She can't toss it to Hiei. Even if he can see it, he's probably busy. Plus, it's easier to see the glowing green thing, and all she has to do is make sure that she goes right at the green thing.

She puts the blade into the thing's green thing, and it shrieks and disappears, and the resistance on the blade is gone. It was a spell... It wasn't alive at all; it was a guardian of whatever's down here. That green-thing was the center.

"Hiei, are you alright?" she asks quickly, searching the dark in the place she saw him fall. He's... There! The white stands out in the dark, but it doesn't move. "Hiei?"

He's still not getting up, so she reaches down and touches at the cowl and follows his shoulder by feel and she helps him sit up, and he grabs her arm and he uses it to pull him up.

"You're hurt," her mouth mumbles before she pays attention. She's not sure if she's asking him or telling him. She can't see anything, but she smells pain and blood, and she felt it in his grip.

"You're hurt worse," he tells her.

"I don't feel it," she responds truthfully.

"Neither do I."

She stumbles through the dark. He makes a move and she hears something, and then he turns around and starts heading back the way they came from. She follows him.

"You got it?" she asks.

"Yes."

She can't see his hand in the dark, so she asks, "What is it?"

"None of your business," he answers, leading her up the stairs. She slips in something as she follows him. The smell wafts up to her as she nearly falls over it. It's blood.

"Hiei?" she asks.

He grunts quietly before collapsing at the top of the stairs. She runs up to catch him before he hits the ground, and she puts his arm over her shoulder. Two or three of the demons are still in the floor negotiating, but they don't pay any attention to them as Me'ran help Hiei out the door.

She realizes how hurt he is when she gets him outside. It's nearly dawn, so the rising sun's letting her see how much blood there is. She pulls the back of his cloak open to see the wound.

There's an axe-head in it. He fell on it, if she had to guess. If the monster had swung it at him, it would have gone much farther in.

"You're hurt pretty bad," she tells him quietly. He glares at her. She smiles nervously. "Shut up and brace yourself, this is gonna hurt."

She takes hold on the back edge of the axe and she pulls, but her hands slide right off. Hiei makes a soft pained sound and tries to move away. She stops a second, and she moves to a different position, sitting next to him with her front facing his side. She puts one foot between his legs and the other behind him, sort of pinning him between her knees. He looks at her, but she puts her hand on his chest to hold him still, and she pushes her fingers into the flesh and she takes a better hold and she jerks her hand and arm back, hard. He turns and slugs her, and her head hits the wall behind her. Her head's fuzzy, and she's dizzy and in pain, now, but she got the axe out. He turns back around with a dark look on his face.

"Fucking Healer, warn me next time," he spits angrily.

"I had a feeling that you wouldn't have resisted the first time I tried if you needed a warning," she groans in return.

She puts his cloak over the bleeding spot and wait for the bleeding to stop. She pulls up her pants legs with her free hand and opens her kit and pulls out the needle and thread and medical tape and gauze, and she checks to see if the bleeding's stopped. It has. She pulls his cloak back and she starts to sew the hole shut. His lack of noise lets her know that he's passed out, or being really stoic.

Then she puts her hand over the sewn-shut wound. She's weak, already, and she knows it, so she heals the bone damage, first, then start working on the necessary muscles.

"You're going to have to deal with the stitches. I won't be able to heal this completely," she says apologetically while she weaves the muscles over his ribcage back into place.

She's so deep in concentration that she doesn't realize that she's beginning to collapse until after she hits the wall. Her concentration finally begins to fall, so she tapes the gauze over the stitches and lets herself fall onto the grass.

"Me...'ran..." Hiei asks. He sounds worried. She allows a feeling of triumph--he used her name.

Dammit, I don't want to make a noise... can I even do it..? Her voice hisses a second until she finally makes her lungs use enough air to go "hgn" at him.

She looks up at him, but she can't see his face. He's still slumped forward, so she pushes him lightly backwards until he hits the wall behind him. His eyes open. He looks at her and he smirks.

"You're alright," she tells him after fighting with her voice. "Just don't move too much for a bit," she adds. "I'm... going to need... a nap."

She tries to move to sit up, but he puts his hand firmly on her arm.

"I can't carry you. Sleep here," he commands. She shrugs.

"Sounds good." And she closes her eyes, and she's out in seconds.