Recap: Basically Hiei broke paradise and found himself in an intervention with Koenma, Kurama and Mukuro having revealed his true identity to Botan.

Chapter 34: Beyond Repair

"Are you sure?" Kuwabara asked.

"I know my own attacks and the wounds they create," Mukuro sternly replied. "And I already know he isn't the Hiei of this reality, he's admitted as much to me himself. What he hasn't admitted to is exactly which Hiei he is."

"He admitted it to me," Kurama said. "The first time he came here he told me where he had come from. It quite interests me that he managed to make it back here – though purely in an academic sense."

"I still don't get it," Kuwabara said. "He's still just Hiei, right?"

"Wrong," Kurama said firmly. "He may have been born the same Hiei we know, but he has created a very different life for himself, a life where he chose to distance himself from all of us without a care."

"Part of the reason I abandoned my research on the Dividing Realities attack was because of my findings," Mukuro added. "Through experimentation I discovered that there are a great many number of alternate realities for each soul, but consistently amongst that number there will always be two extremes: a utopia and a dystopia. This reality is not the utopia of Hiei's life, but it's very close. The reality he originates from, however, is the dystopia of his life, and all entirely of his own making. The only surprising thing about this is that he did want to come back here, since he seems to have come from a life where he despised everything present in this reality so much that he chose to destroy it all."

"Fate is not a malleable matter," the guardian of fate said. "And messing with it can have dire consequences. His presence here has offset the balance in both this reality and his own. He must be made to return immediately if we are to have any hope of restoring that balance."

"I gave him the chance to leave," Kurama said. "I tried to reach his conscience and I tried to be direct, but he seems quite unwilling to go."

"Perhaps that's because he realises that this is a better way of life for him," Koenma suggested. "Maybe in his own reality he had reached a point where he has realised the error of his ways, but it's too late for him to fix them."

"I wouldn't be so lenient," Kurama said. "From what he has told me about his reality, it seems quite bleak and he seems almost proud of it."

"I already know he killed my ambassador in his own reality, and before he was able to deliver his anti-war speech," Mukuro said. "And there is a war in his reality, which is why he's here. I sent him here to try to get answers to make it stop."

"His reality has more problems than the war," Kurama said.

"What about us?" Botan asked. "What about me and Monzan and the baby? Where are we?"

Hiei met Botan's eyes, the look of hurt and confusion there causing a dull pain in his chest that was not in the least helped by the sight of Koenma still holding onto her.

"Go ahead and tell her, Hiei," Kurama said.

"Fuck you, fox!" Hiei snapped, rounding on him.

He heard Botan gasp behind him but he was too infuriated to care.

"You're so self-righteous and arrogant!" he continued. "Maybe my life in that other reality is bad because of things I did, but your life is no better, and that's not my fault! You're a devious, murderous monster in my reality, and you've got no-one to blame for that but yourself! And Yusuke isn't any better, and he's acting that way here, so obviously that's nothing to do with me either! And Kuwabara's a pathetic loser, and his problems are all his own doing – okay, so the SDF wiped his memories, but it's not like he uses his powers here anyway! And Botan…"

Hiei turned to Botan, his anger slowly lessening as he looked her in the eye. He could disperse blame for the other's misery outwards, but when it came to Botan (and Yukina), Hiei could only see that he was to blame for the way things were in his own, miserable, dystopia reality.

"You don't even love me," she said faintly.

"No, I do love you," he instantly replied. "That's what I've been trying to tell you!"

She shook her head, tears spilling from her eyes soundlessly.

"My Hiei loves me," she said. "The Hiei who almost died for me, the Hiei who romanced me and married me and fathered my children loves me. But you're not him. And impersonating him is the worst possible thing you could have done. Pretending to be a man as great as he is in order to sleep with his wife and pretend to care about his son makes you the most vile and rotten soul of all. If you have even the slightest hint of a conscience left, you will get out of my husband's body, get out of our lives, and don't even think about coming back."

"You don't understand," Hiei insisted. "It isn't like that."

"You are not my husband," Botan said, clutching onto Koenma slightly tighter. "And that's all I need to understand."

"I did warn you that he would hurt you, Botan," Koenma said.

Hiei slowly moved his eyes to Koenma, readying himself to simply vent his anger against the prince in whatever form it happened to take: verbal or physical, he was beyond caring.

"Don't talk like that!" Botan snapped before Hiei could follow through.

She pushed Koenma away from herself and glared at him with arguably as much anger as Hiei had done.

"The Hiei I married would never hurt me!" she yelled. "This isn't the Hiei I married!"

Hiei flinched as she pointed at him, his anger subsiding as the reluctant realisation dawned on him that he had, officially, broken paradise to the point that it now truly was beyond repair. With Botan lost to him and everyone else fully aware that he was an imposter, his time there was limited: and even if he did stay, there was nothing left worth staying for.

"I'm not going back there," he said suddenly, unable to stop the words from leaving his mouth. "You can't make me go back."

"I beg to differ," Mukuro muttered under her breath.

"You must go back," Kurama insisted. "And not just because your continued presence here threatens the tranquillity of this dimension but because we want our own Hiei back, and until you leave, that cannot happen."

"Hey Hiei, it is the honourable thing to do, you know," Kuwabara added. "Think about Yukina, Botan and Monzan. Don't they deserve to have their brother, husband and father back?"

"I am Yukina's brother, Botan's husband and Monzan's father, you idiot!" Hiei argued.

"Did you marry Botan in your reality?" Kurama asked. "I thought you said that never happened."

Hiei gave him a hard look, though inwardly he was slightly relieved that Kurama had not also mentioned that, in his own reality, Hiei had also let Botan die.

"Do you still have the healing balm I gave you?" Kurama asked him.

Hiei thrust a hand into one pocket and closed his fingers around the small glass jar. Kurama nodded at him and he withdrew his hand again, holding up the jar for long enough to be sure that everyone in the room had seen it before flinging it at the nearest wall, where it smashed, spraying its contents over the wall in slimy splat mark.

"Well that was helpful," Koenma muttered, rolling his eyes.

"You must go back to where you came from," the guardian of fate said. "This is a very serious matter. Some things are meant to be."

Hiei pulled a face at her but apparently she did not realise how ridiculous she sounded as she remained unaffected.

"Yes, some things were meant to be!" he sneered sarcastically. "I was meant to marry her and she was meant to have my children!"

Botan's face changed and Hiei momentarily forgot about the spirit behind her.

"I see," she said. "So to you I'm just a sex toy and a baby factory. It's lucky for you that my real husband isn't here right now, because he would kill you for talking about me like that, not to mention for pretending to be him and using me for sex!"

"I never used you for sex!" Hiei quickly argued back. "When I first arrived here, you tied me up in your bed and performed oral sex on me against my will!"

Botan gasped, everyone else looked a little awkward and Koenma looked like he might pass out: though a steadying hand on his shoulder from Kuwabara kept him upright.

"You're a monster," Botan said in a low voice. "I let you into my home, I took care of you, I let you touch me and I let you touch my baby, and you lied to me about who you were the whole time! The Hiei I know – the Hiei I've always known, even back when he was nothing more than a common criminal – had more dignity than to do something so low and dishonourable as to take advantage of a pregnant woman and her young child! You should be ashamed of yourself! Is your life terrible in your own dimension?"

Hiei hesitated before he answered her, partly to allow himself to recover slightly from the wounds to his pride that her words were inflicting.

"Yes, more so than you could ever imagine," he eventually said.

"And it is that way because of decisions that you made?" she asked.

He nodded reluctantly.

"So then you deserve to be there," she said. "And you are not even worthy of our pity."

"You don't understand–"

"Hiei, you are making this harder for everyone than it needs to be and you are being extremely selfish," Kurama interrupted. "You told me that demon world is at war in your reality, and if your being here caused something like that to happen in this dimension that would be disastrous. Surely you understand why you must go?"

Hiei tried not to think about Hitoshi lying in pieces in a pool of his own blood outside of Yusuke's tower.

"I don't want to go," he said faintly.

"You must," Kurama insisted.

"But…"

Hiei looked about himself desperately in the vain hope that something might appear to make everything alright again: but all he could think of in that moment was that it was over. Even if he managed to convince Mukuro in his own reality to send him back, he would never be able to stay where he was, no matter how badly he wanted to.

Mukuro of the paradise reality had been right about him: his was the sort of heart that was better left alone, better to have never known love than to have felt it so keenly only to lose it.

"Please don't make me go back," he said, turning to Botan.

"After what you did to me?"

"I didn't actually kill you, I just let you die!"

"Wh-what?"

Hiei felt the sinking sensation in his gut tug lower down: apparently nobody had bothered to enlighten Botan on the exact circumstances of her life in Hiei's own reality.

"I'm dead in your reality?" she asked. "Because of you? But… You were always such an honourable…"

"It was an accident," Hiei said.

"It was a conscious decision," Kurama corrected him. "You let the rock monster kill her. You told me as much."

Botan gasped.

"I knew I saw doubt in your face that day!" she said weakly. "You're the Hiei who did turn away from me that day!"

Hiei shook his head though he wondered why he was bothering, since even his own mind was screaming "guilty" at him. He had run out of excuses and ideas, and so he stood still and silent for a long time, simply looking at Botan and considering the bitter irony of her fearing and hating him even in paradise. He only awoke from his thoughts when something slapped at his abdomen and when he turned his head he was only slightly surprised to see that Kurama had just scraped some of the healing balm from the wall and applied it to his wound.

"I want to see Monzan," he said to Kurama.

"He's not your son," Kurama answered him.

"Yes he is, and I want to see him," Hiei insisted. "Now!"

When nobody responded to Hiei's demand he spun around and fled from the room, distinctly feeling his skin closing over his wound as he ran down the hall towards the front door. He almost fell as he stumbled down the porch steps and turned towards the koi pond Yukina and Monzan were still sat at, blissful in their own ignorance of what was happening inside the temple.

"Monzan!" Hiei hollered.

Monzan looked up immediately and smiled at him.

"Daddy!" he called back, waving at him.

Hiei started towards him, reaching the paved edge of the walkway around the pond before suddenly everything around him changed and Monzan, Yukina and their ice statue vanished.

Hiei stopped.

The pond was suddenly devoid of koi and instead filled with algae and garbage. The paving stones had been smashed and were littered with offensive writing and explicit line drawings. The temple was mostly caved in and barely recognisable, and half of it was surrounded with "condemned building" tape. In the forest beyond the temple, the tree cover was thick and unending, the clearing where the tree-house was meant to be was non-existent and the tree-house itself of course not present.

Hiei slowly turned around on the spot he was stood on. His eyes found nothing of greatness, his ears heard only the wind in the trees and the only remotely positive thing he could feel was that, for the first time in a long time, his body felt healed and relaxed from no longer having to suffer a permanent injury.

Still feeling a little numb and disbelieving, Hiei turned back to the temple and made his way over to the part that was still standing, moving inside and trying to find his bearings. The kitchen was gone, as was half of the living room and some of the guest rooms, but most of the main hallway was still present. Hiei followed it deeper into the temple, into a part of the building where the roof and windows were hidden from the outside world beneath the rubble of the destroyed part of the building, meaning that it was still relatively in tact: though anything of value had been stripped out and what remained had been vandalised maliciously.

The room where Hiei had sent Monzan to clean their swords was still in tact, though it was empty and had a family of racoons living in the back corner. The display cabinet that had once held all the swords – the swords that Yukina had said were valuable antiques by living world standards – had been brutally smashed open and its contents long gone, including the set of swords Hiei had taken a weapon from for Monzan.

Hiei continued through the temple and out the back door, glancing at the paved area where he had sometimes seen Kuwabara's stupidly expensive car parked but now saw nothing but more rubble. He moved on, rounding the outside of the building and crossing the lawn to the forest beyond, only stopping when he reached a tree with an unusual pattern in the bark up one side of the trunk: in the paradise reality, that tree had been one of the trees his tree-house was mounted onto, and yet now it was just another tree amongst many others, with nothing startling to be seen between them.

He moved on again, trying to ignore the wind that was picking up around him. It had not been windy in paradise, but it was windy back in the norm reality, and quite cold too. He had a shirt on again and a sword at his side because he was back in the reality where he had been in possession of those things: and as he passed through the battered and broken down temple gates to the long set of worn and graffiti-stained steps beyond, Hiei felt something else he had just come into ownership of once more.

But he was not quite ready to think about that yet – neither why he still had it in his pocket nor what it contained.

He continued down the steps and along the vague path through the forest beyond until he eventually reached the roadside, where he sat down on the presumably purposely placed flat rock by the bus stop there. He could see the city beyond from where he sat and traffic was infrequently passing him by, so he considered himself to be in an obvious place, which was the best sort of place for him to be, since he now needed to get himself arrested by the spirit world Special Defence Force – again – and have them return him to demon world – again – so that he could confront a no doubt irate Mukuro – again – and commence the process of carrying out her plan to end the war – again.

Hiei took a brief moment to check on the things he felt strong enough to face: using his jagan eye he located Mukuro, in her headquarters, still fretting over maps and tactics with her senior officers, he roughly located Yusuke, and was able to confirm only that the Mazoku was still in his full demon form, still in his own territory in demon world and very much still alive, he felt that Kurama was still alive, but typically obscured and impossible to locate and finally he located Yukina, who was still alone in the ice village, sitting in the same place, in the same house, wearing the same expression.

Hiei did not bother trying to find Botan. She had said that she would not become Koenma's wife after all, but he did not want to take the risk of finding out that she had if he tried to check on her. Though he did wonder where she was, what she was doing and how she felt.

In his mind, he could still see the loving way she had looked at him in the paradise reality, and it was the most wonderful thought of all.

Hiei tensed and squinted angrily at the shadow suddenly fallen over him, seeing a bus stopped at the bus stop he was sat at. After several seconds he realised that, in accordance with human traditions, the bus driver had probably stopped because he seemed to be waiting at the bus stop. He turned his head away in disgust, and after a few seconds more, the bus drove on. Once it was out of sight Hiei turned back, starting in alarm as he saw a single human figure staggering about in a strange, confused daze as though drunk or simple. Or both.

"Oops," he said. "Guess I got off at the wrong stop again."

Hiei could not stop his face from contorting as he saw that the idiot grinning down at him was none other than Kuwabara.

"I do that a lot," he said, shrugging and grinning like a fool. "It isn't even the right bus! I keep getting on it all the time and coming out here, I don't even know why, there's nothing out here!"

Hiei continued to flicker between confusion, disbelief and disgust as he regarded the human, and he saw Kuwabara's grin slowly fade, a look of recognition starting to appear in his eyes. Of all the places to encounter Kuwabara in his own reality, Hiei had never expected to find him so close to the old lady's temple, and that, combined with the increasing look of realisation on his face started to make Hiei wonder if perhaps, in his prolonged absence from his own reality, Kuwabara had somehow remembered who and what he was.

"Hey, it's you!" he said suddenly. "You little punk! Look at you with your ripped shirt and your fake katana and your little white belts – you're just a little rebel, aren't you?"

Hiei's face dropped. Clearly Kuwabara did not remember who he was after all.

"What you been up to, little guy?" Kuwabara asked, failing to notice the flat look on condescension Hiei was giving him. "Going to school and staying out of trouble, I hope? I haven't seen you in a while: did your mom and dad ground you for your latest shenanigans?"

"I'm not a fucking child, you idiotic oaf!" Hiei snapped irritably.

"Whoa there, little guy!" Kuwabara said. "You know maybe if you sorted out that attitude of yours, got yourself a decent, manly, haircut, stopped wearing those freaky red contact lenses and got a good honest job, you wouldn't get yourself in trouble all the time and people might start treating you with a little more respect."

Hiei opened his mouth to deliver a bitingly witty retort but stopped short as Kuwabara sat down next to him.

"What are you doing?" he demanded instead.

"It's a long walk back into the city," Kuwabara replied. "I'll just wait for the next bus. I notice you didn't get on the bus there. What's wrong? Did you spend all your pocket money? No money left for a bus fare home?"

"I swear, if you refer to me as a child one more time, I will–"

"Don't worry about it, kid. I'll buy you a ticket back. I don't approve of your rebel ways, but I remember what it was like to be a kid nobody thought that much of. When I was at school, my teachers hated me, they all thought that I had a bad attitude and that I would never make anything of myself, but hey, look at me now."

Hiei felt one of his eyes twitch uncontrollably. Kuwabara was – in this reality – still an idiot in a bad suit (that was slightly too short in the arms and legs and slightly too tight across the shoulders), with a too-short haircut, a terrible excuse for facial hair dirtying his face, a dead-end job and an apartment that bordered one of the worst areas of the city.

"Just think, kid: if you work hard, you could be just like me one day!" Kuwabara added, elbowing Hiei in the ribs.

"Oh fuck you, you idiot!" Hiei snapped, pushing his arm away and standing up abruptly. "Don't you see what's happening around here? You were always the sensitive one – psychically and emotionally – and no amount of mind patching by the SDF could possibly have changed that! Can't you see it? Look around you! This is the dystopia of our lives! We're living in hell! And you're smiling about it? Are you out of your fucking mind? Maybe you're the one who should be in a straightjacket instead of Shuichi! At least he knows this life is a mess! At least he's not living in constant denial and ignorance of what's really happening around here! This life is the worst possible outcome for any of us and it's all because of–"

Hiei landed hard on his rear-end suddenly, his legs crumpled beneath him. He suddenly felt light-headed and there was a dull, throbbing pain in his chest. It was obviously exhaustion and caffeine withdrawal, he told himself.

"Hey little guy, are you crying?"

Hiei froze, his anger peaking so suddenly and so violently, his body took a moment to catch up.

"No I'm not fucking "crying", you fool!" he yelled angrily. "I do not "cry"! Do I look like the kind of soft-hearted, weak-willed idiot who "cries"? I have never "cried" in my life! Not even when I was a starving baby trapped in warding bandages thrown from a cliff and left to die!"

"Aw, you've had a tough childhood, huh little guy?" Kuwabara said softly. "I can tell by that crappy tattoo you've got up your arm there – you're in a gang, aren't you? You know, I could probably get you a job at the company I work for. It would be just as a dogsbody, but you'd be working for the most successful architectural firm in Japan–"

"You're the most successful architectural firm in Japan! Or at least, you're supposed to be! You were supposed to build me a fucking house and go and drive around in your stupid car and use your money to stop the temple up there turning into the pile of shit it now is!"

Kuwabara looked back over his shoulder with a look of genuine surprise.

"There's a temple up there?" he asked, pointing into the forest. "Really? I thought it was just forests all the way out to sea from here!"

Hiei sighed and shook his head, and he distinctly felt something wet glide over one cheek. He angrily swiped a hand at his face to clear it away, glaring threateningly at Kuwabara as he gave him a sympathetic look.

"It's rainwater," he growled.

Kuwabara looked up at the sky before giving Hiei a withering look.

"There are clouds up there, and maybe it isn't raining over there with you, but it's raining over here with me, okay?" Hiei snapped.

Kuwabara slowly stretched out one arm, his fingertips almost reaching where Hiei was sat. He turned his palm upwards and looked up at the sky expectantly, leaving Hiei wondering if he was being sarcastic or just plain idiotic.

"This is ridiculous," he said through a sigh. "Absolutely ridiculous…"

He got to his feet, took a moment to straighten his clothes as best he could and drag the back of one hand over one side of his face as it felt wet again, and he then positioned himself directly in front of Kuwabara and pulled off his bandana, glaring down into his eyes with his jagan eye. Kuwabara stared up at him in a transfixed state, and they stayed that way for some time, every passing second leaving Hiei feeling increasingly depressed: it was not that the Special Defence Force had done an excellent job of blanking Kuwabara's memories that was the problem, it was simply that Kuwabara was a very powerful psychic and, even though he was not aware of it, his powers were at work when Hiei tried to access his mind. In another twist of bitter irony, Kuwabara's own biggest strength had been turned into his biggest weakness, because as long as he was a powerful psychic, there was no way Hiei could penetrate the barriers surrounding his mind and undo the damage the Special Defence Force had done.

Hiei did wonder then though how the Special Defence Force had managed to penetrate those barriers in the first place to do the damage they had – more spirit world trickery and another reason to despise the bastards, he concluded.

With a sigh Hiei stepped back from Kuwabara and reluctantly accepted the facts: there was no undoing what had been done to Kuwabara, everything in the living world was a mess, spirit world wanted him dead and he would eventually have to go back to demon world, where he would face the one option he had left in his life to do something honourable.

He was going to have to sacrifice the lives of Yusuke and Kurama, along with his own, to end the war.

"Oh my God!" Kuwabara said suddenly, his outburst proving to be an almost welcome distraction for Hiei from his own dark thoughts. "What the hell is that?"

He slowly stood up, looking shocked, but something in his eyes looking strangely different: and for one brief and glorious moment, Hiei thought that perhaps he had, without really realising it, undone the damage he had been trying to fix after all.

The moment ended abruptly when Kuwabara poked one finger hard into the centre of Hiei's jagan eye.

"Ew!" he cried, retracting his finger and cradling it in his other hand as though he was the one that had been hurt by what he had just done. "It's wet and warm and sticky! And it looks so real!"

"It is real, you porcine prick!" Hiei snarled, cupping a hand over his aching eye. "And it's extremely sensitive, so don't poke it like a backward child who's never seen one before!"

"It even felt real!" Kuwabara wailed. "What sort of gang makes you get a big ugly dragon tattoo all the way up your arm and wear a squidgy wet eye in the middle of your forehead?"

Hiei wanted to argue, he wanted to tell Kuwabara what a truly hopeless idiot he was, but as he considered what had just happened, he suddenly found himself overwhelmed again and almost falling down again. If Kuwabara was so immune to Hiei's jagan eye and so convinced that it was not real, then clearly he was lost to Hiei completely. There was nothing that could be done to fix him: his mind was broken and so was he.

"Fuck," Hiei said, pulling his bandana back on.

He started to walk off but stopped as Kuwabara grabbed his arm.

"Hey, little guy, look, I can help you, you know," he said. "I know it must be tough if you're in a gang and you feel like you can't get out, but I could help you. You could stay at my place if you needed to, or maybe I could talk to your parents. You seem like a good kid, just misunderstood. I knew a guy like you once, I think… He didn't have a dad either."

Hiei sobered slightly.

"I never told you that I don't have a father," he said, turning his head to give Kuwabara a scrutinising glare.

"You didn't?" Kuwabara asked. "Oh… But you don't though, right?"

There was something there. The Special Defence Force had not been quite so thorough as they ought to have been, as Hiei could see and feel that there was a minute amount of Kuwabara's mind that still understood exactly who Hiei was and what his presence there meant: but it was overwhelmed by the enormous part of his mind that had been reprogrammed, and it was just beyond his reach.

"I know what it's like to have people underestimate you all the time," Kuwabara added, unwittingly picking words that Hiei rather liked. "And I know how it feels to want something so badly, to need it so badly that it takes over everything. Like you can see it, you can hear it, you can smell it and you can even taste it, but you just can't quite reach out and touch it because it's just slightly beyond your reach… I can help you, kid."

"No, rather unfortunately, you can't," Hiei said quietly. "You were my last hope for this dimension, but I can see that you've become something utterly hopeless."

Hiei pulled his arm from Kuwabara's grasp and walked on.

"Hey little guy, where are you going?" he called after him.

"I'm going to speak with the one sensible and sane person left in this world," Hiei said, smirking to himself in bitter amusement. "And rather ironically, he's so insensible and insane, they keep him in a hospital for the mentally ill."

Hiei was not sure which surprised him more: the fact that he made it to the hospital without a single member of the Special Defence Force giving pursuit or that when he forced his way in through the back entrance and to the dining hall he found Shuichi waiting for him at a table for two, laid with two trays of food.

"Are you expecting someone?" Hiei asked as he sat down in front of one tray of food.

"Yes," Shuichi replied, giving him a small smile. "I was expecting you, Hiei."

Hiei slowly narrowed his eyes.

"I heard a ruckus in the gardens as I was collecting my food tray," Shuichi added, upon seeing Hiei's scepticism. "And so I took the liberty of collecting a second tray for you in case you were hungry."

Hiei nodded, deciding that this explanation was at least a little more acceptable than the concept of Shuichi having sensed his approach using some sort of extrasensory power or ability.

"So what brings you here? Again?" Shuichi asked casually, as though remarking on the amount of rain there had been lately.

Hiei plunged one hand into his pocket and took out the object he had felt there earlier, throwing it down into the table between their trays. Shuichi carefully opened it out, eyed it over and then nodded.

"You've visited some more alternate realities?" he concluded. "And you've kept track of them on the reality chart, I see."

"I got back to the paradise reality," Hiei said, looking down at the food before him.

"Despite the unlikelihood of such a thing?" Shuichi asked.

"I broke it," Hiei confessed, before grabbing up a handful of food and stuffing it into his mouth, distracting himself with the effort of trying to chew through it all.

"Oh dear," Shuichi said with a heavy sigh. "And now you have returned here. By choice? Were you ousted from the alternate reality for the crime of breaking it or did you return here by conscious choice?"

"Ousted," Hiei managed to articulate through the food crammed between his jaws.

"Oh, I thought perhaps you had returned of your own volition. That would have been a sure indication that you had finally learnt your lesson and started to make good decisions and take responsibility for the wrongs you have done in your life, to make the effort to set them right."

Hiei shook his head. He wanted to tell Shuichi what a prick he thought he was, but his mouth was still too full to talk coherently.

"You seem different somehow though," Shuichi continued, taking full advantage of Hiei's silence. "Perhaps even though you are not here by choice, even though you do still wish for an easy way out of this mess, you realise now that there is no quick fix to be had."

Hiei tried to tell Shuichi that he was as big a nag as Kurama, but, through a mouthful of rice and tuna, it sounded more like "woo a bigger mama", which earned him a few questioning looks from those sat at nearby tables, something that seemed all the worse when Hiei considered that those giving him the questioning looks were themselves of poor mental health.

"I believe there is a way out of this mess, Hiei," Shuichi continued. "Whilst it is, quite clearly, impossible to make this reality exactly the same as the one you adore so passionately, you can at least strive towards it by improving what remains in this dimension. Find the common denominators between this reality and the one you seek to replicate, and build upon them, and there you have the raw materials to build the foundations of paradise."

Hiei swallowed hard, his eyes watering slightly as his throat was forced to expand to an unreasonable girth to pass the contents of his mouth down his oesophagus.

"A better way of life is easily within our grasp with a little application and a lot of teamwork and cooperation," he said mockingly. "We have the raw materials, we have the skills and we have the resources: and so let us build the foundations of paradise, and let us start with a simple act of goodwill."

Shuichi frowned.

"I-I don't understand," he said. "What are you talking about? What act of goodwill?"

Hiei groaned and grabbed up the plastic cup of tea from his tray. He hurriedly drank it down, still surprised and mildly amused to find that Shuichi had already taken the liberty of sweetening it to his tastes. He then stuffed as much food as he could fit into his mouth and stood from the table, nodding at Shuichi.

"You're leaving already?" Shuichi asked. "To build the foundations of paradise?"

Hiei rolled his eyes.

"Won't you need this?" Shuichi asked, picking up the reality chart and holding it out towards him.

Hiei shook his head and walked off. Apparently Shuichi was going to be as much use as he always had been: none at all. Kuwabara was broken and beyond repair and Shuichi was merely a shadow of Kurama, and fixing him into something useful was not even plausible, since he had never been anything useful to begin with, his only real purpose ever being as a human shell for Kurama to inhabit when he wanted to hide in the living world.

With nowhere else left to go, no other avenues left to explore, with nobody else left to turn to and absolutely no hope for the future, Hiei took himself outside and slowly started back towards the city. The Special Defence Force were bound to catch up to him eventually, he decided, and once they did all that was left was to confront Mukuro and listen to her yell at him about his selfishness for a little while before following through with her plan and taking the fate that he had originally thought would befall him before he began leaping between realities: an "honourable" death.

Next Chapter: The SDF are conspicuous by their absence, and as he waits for them to resurface, Hiei tries to force some sense back into Kuwabara, and in doing so realises that he does not actually want to face his fate just yet, that there is one thing he wants to fix first, one thing that he can actually repair. But Kuwabara remains unresponsive, and Hiei starts to lose hope: until a certain female approaches him with an unexpected "simple act of goodwill". Chapter 35: Foundations of Paradise

A/N: And now it all the symbolism, moments of déjà vu and irony starts to come together: but probably not in the way anyone thinks it will.