Sorry it took so long to update. I had this done Saturday (March 20), but since some person (not mentioning names… I'm not pissed anymore. So long as that person leaves me alone now) reported me for "YYH Interview" being in script format, I didn't have upload access until March 24, 2004, at 9:23 PM pst. I'm not even in the PST time zone, so really I couldn't get on until March 25th... *curses loudly*

CHAPTER THREE

Arguments

Hiei threw himself onto his bed and lay there for a second in complete silence. Silence is nice, he decided. Of course, nice never lasts.

"What's with sealing yourself in your room? Come on, Hiei, you're no fun."

"Cut me a break, kitsune. Have you ever known me to have fun?"

"Yes. When you're with Shadow you have fun."

Hiei growled. "Shut up."

"You know it's true. I know it's true. Remember, I'm part of you. I know your every conscious thought. Hell, I could probably dig into your subconscious if I tried hard enough."

"Shut up, fox! You're going to make me rip out my own eyes!"

"Oh, Hiei. Don't do that. That would be stupid," Youko said, sounding concerned. (Well, he didn't actually physically/audibly say it, since nobody but Hiei heard him, but when I say Youko said something, unless he is out, you know I mean he said it to Hiei, in Hiei's head. OKAY?! Geez. Perfectionists.)

"No, really?" Hiei retorted.

"Yes. Really. If you tore out your eyes, you wouldn't be able to see, and I wouldn't be able to see, and that would be horrible."

"Yeah. No more staring at Shadow," Hiei retorted.

"Yes, Hiei, but I only stare at Shadow if you stare at Shadow."

"D'oh! You know what, Fox? You're going to drive me completely insane. Then I'll be locked in a white room and only see Shadow when she brings me food."

"Is there really an insane asylum in this house? Because with everything else here, I seriously wouldn't doubt it. Shuichi never explored the entire house very thoroughly. But you live here. Maybe I'll find out some... interesting... things."

"Sure, Youko." Hiei tried his best to cut off any thoughts he was having. Of course, he was able to do it when his mind was clear, but with this fox in his head, he was fairly sure his mind would never be clear. Not until he managed to control him. Suddenly, Hiei realized Youko was silent. It was a relief. Until he realized most likely why Youko was silent.

"Invading my thoughts again, Fox?"

"Sorry, Hiei. It's hard to resist."

"Not like you're really trying that hard, though."

The fox chuckled. Hiei sighed and curled up on his bed, and Youko shut up as the demon drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, Shadow was startled to wake up with somebody else in her bed. His arms were wrapped around her waist from behind and his head rested on her shoulder.

"Dammit, Youko!" she thought. However, she rolled over to find Hiei lying beside her. "Hiei?!"

The little demon's red eyes opened slowly, and he stared at Shadow.

"Shadow? Why am I... Oh SHIT!" Hiei sat bolt upright and glanced down at the slightly confused Shadow, lying on her back looking up at him. "I'm sorry, Shadow." "Dammit, Youko, you sick bastard!"

"Sorry, Hiei... It was so tempting..."

"You didn't do anything to her, did you?"

"Do anything...? Hiei! Now who's the sick bastard?"

"I wouldn't put it past you!"

"You're so trusting. I think you would have realized it if I was raping her or something, Jaganshi."

"Well I obviously was oblivious when you came down here and got in bed with her! Why would I have noticed if you had?"

"Hiei, don't you know anything about sex?"

Hiei snarled. "I'm not some cave-man, fox. I think I know a bit more than you give me credit for."

"Just making sure... Though I suppose I could have just read your mind."

Hiei snarled again, just as the door to Shadow's room opened. In his argument, Hiei had been completely oblivious when Shadow got out of bed and went to open the door for whoever was knocking on it. It was Kurama. He stared.

"I didn't mean to interrupt anything..."

"Interrupt?" Shadow said, clueless.

"Forget it," Hiei said, pushing past them and walking down the hall.

"Anyway..." Shadow said absently, staring down the hall at Hiei.

"Yes... I was just seeing if you were awake, Shadow. I mean, it's three thirty in the afternoon. When somebody sleeps for seventeen hours, it tends to worry me."

"Seventeen hours?"

"Yeah... You went to bed around ten, and now it's three thirty. That's seventeen hours, give or take... Probably give. You were sleeping the whole time, weren't you?" Kurama said, a nervous/suspicious/worried expression on his face. Shadow blinked, still too asleep to understand what he was getting at.

"Huh?"

"Shadow, Youko is in Hiei's mind, and Hiei... was in your bed... and you were in your room for seventeen hours..."

Shadow finally got it. And she flatly replied, "Unless I slept through it, Youko did not screw me."

"Okay!" Kurama said in a little voice. "Just making sure... It is kind of suspicious..."

Shadow smirked. "Jealous?"

"No!" Kurama said.

"Sure... Well if you don't mind, I would like to get dressed." She shut the door in his face. Kurama made his way down stairs. Eclipse was waiting for him.

"What is it?" she said, seeing the look on his face.

"Oh, nothing major... I just went up there and found Hiei in Shadow's bed..."

"Ork!"

"Shadow says that unless she slept through it, she's still a virgin. Well those weren't her exact words, and hopefully she is still a virgin, but... Well, you know what I mean."

Shadow came trudging down the stairs a second later, still dressed the shorts and loose t-shirt she slept in. Kurama looked at her questioningly.

"I'm hungry," she said.

"Ah."

She came out of the kitchen a few minutes later with a mixing bowl filled with a mixture of cereals and other foods. Eclipse and Kurama looked at her funny, but she ignored them and sat on the couch, absentmindedly shoveling handfuls of food into her mouth and staring off into space.

"Shadow? Are you all right?" Eclipse asked.

"Yes... I'm just trying to remember why I didn't notice when Hiei came in my room and got in my bed."

"Shadow, the way you sleep, somebody could drop and atomic bomb in the front lawn, let those damned weasels loose in your bedroom, and a minor hurricane could blow through your room, and you wouldn't even wake up through it," Eclipse pointed out. Shadow shrugged.

"True."

"But then again, that means you could probably sleep through sex, too."

That definitely got everyone's attention. Shadow slammed her bowl down on the table. Cocoa Puffs and orange slices flew everywhere.

"Let's not even go there!" she snapped. She shot up the stairs. After staring in that direction for a few minutes and hearing no murders, Kurama and Eclipse decided to see what Shadow was having for breakfast. The two of them peered into the bowl and almost gagged.

Cocoa Puffs and oranges were already mentioned. Well, in addition, there were spaghetti noodles, banana slices, mushrooms, Chex Mix, and over all of it... Chocolate syrup. Eclipse poked at a strange looking blob of goo.

"I think it's Spam," Kurama mumbled, looking dazed. Eclipse gagged.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Shadow had made a point of getting fully dressed before stomping up to Hiei's room.

"Hiei!" she said, knocking on the door. "Open the door!"

"Oh shit," Hiei thought.

"What? She's been in your room before, hasn't she?"

"She sounds pissed, Fox. Shut up, and don't try anything. Somebody will get hurt. Probably you." Hiei went to his door and opened it, slightly nervous.

"Why were you in my bed?" Shadow asked abruptly.

"Youko."

"Well Youko didn't harass me in my deeper-than-R.E.M. sleep, did he?"

"Well?" Hiei prompted.

"Didn't I already go through this with you? I got you two in the same bed, but I didn't do anything else. Geez. Why doesn't anybody trust me?"

Hiei ignored the last question, because it was just stupid, and turned his attention to Shadow. "He says he didn't."

"Okay. Because I didn't think he did. I didn't feel any... different... when I woke up... Except that my friend was sleeping pressed up against my back with his arms around my waist."

Hiei blushed very slightly.

"So, I'm assuming you didn't figure out a way to control him?" Shadow said. Hiei shook his head. "Well figure it out soon, before any nighttime encounters turn into... something else..."

"Horizontal sports?" Youko suggested. Inwardly, Hiei screamed with disgust. He hit himself in the head.

"Psycho!" Hiei accused. Shadow knew by the look on his face that he was having a nice 'chat' with his fox friend. She excused herself and walked down the hall towards the stairs.

Meanwhile, Eclipse and Kurama were so disgusted with the mixture Shadow had in that bowl that they had found some chopsticks and were separating the chunks of fruit and Spam and mushrooms out of the cereal. They couldn't do anything about the chocolate syrup it was all saturated with, but they did their best.

"What are you doing?"

Shadow was suddenly behind them.

"You're messing with my breakfast."

"Well, it looked disgusting," Kurama said.

"But it isn't."

"It had mold in it. We're searching for more," Eclipse lied.

"Food inspectors, now?" Shadow said. "Gimme that, fools." She grabbed the bowl and poured what was left into her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed.

Eclipse and Kurama stared, on the verge of throwing up.

"Actually, it is pretty disgusting," Shadow said. She ran out of the room with her hand over her mouth. The bathroom door slammed a second later.

"Ew..."

Kurama hurriedly gathered the crap they had picked out and threw it in the garbage.

Hiei was nowhere to be seen all day. He had locked himself in his dark room to meditate or train or whatever he had to do to keep that fox in his head... well... to keep him in his head. Instead of out and about. Not like he really wanted to keep him in his head, but it was better than being in Youko's head. Scary. *Shudder*

Somebody knocked on his door. He looked at the clock. Six thirty.

"Oh, Hiei!" Shadow called through his door. "Dinner time."

"I'm not hungry."

"YES YOU ARE! YOU HAVEN'T EATEN ANYTHING SINCE YESTERDAY, YOU VERTICALLY CHALLENGED, ANTI-GRAV-HAIRED, SWORD SWINGING LUNATIC!"

"Interesting nicknames."

"Shut up, fox."

"Fine. I'm coming," Hiei said. He got up and went down to the dinner table with Shadow. She pointed at a box on the table.

"Pizza."

"Yes, I could tell," Hiei said sarcastically.

"You could? But the box is closed!"

"Well, it says 'fresh baked pizza' on it, and there's coupons tacked to the box."

"Oh. Well, isn't that interesting..." Shadow pulled the coupon sheet off and used the tape to stick it to Kurama's shoulder. He sighed and pulled it off, setting it on the table and sitting down across from Hiei.

"It's strange to see things through your eyes, Hiei. Like looking at Shuichi. I'm not used to that," Youko commented.

"That's nice," Hiei said absently, taking a bite out of his pizza.

"And when you're standing up, you're constantly looking up."

"I am not! Shadow's only about two inches taller than me!"

"But Shuichi is almost a foot taller than you. I'm used to seeing things out of his eyes. Or my eyes. And I'm even taller than he is."

"You know what, fox? Shut up." With that, Hiei refused to acknowledge Youko's comments, and wondered why the hell he hadn't done that from the start of things. Eventually, the fox gave up on pestering him.

After dinner, they sat there and watched TV. Hiei ended up staying there and sitting through some incredibly cheesy movie about... well, he wasn't sure what it was about. Half the time he had been arguing with Youko over... something. He wasn't sure what he had been arguing about, because it kept ending up as an argument over Shadow.

Needless to say, it was getting rather annoying. But Hiei, being... well... being Hiei, managed to endure it. Because he is almost-almighty, after all... Never mind. Somebody out there knows what I'm talking about.

Two days later...

Shadow rolled over and came face to face with Hiei. She groaned.

"Hiei, I really wish you'd do something about this."

The little demon's eyes snapped open.

"Damn fox," he mumbled.

Hiei groaned and got out of Shadow's bed. As he walked out of the room, he screamed his mental lungs out at Youko.

"WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS EVERY NIGHT SINCE YOU GOT IN MY HEAD?"

"I don't understand you, Hiei. What's so bad about sleeping with her?"

"It's not by my choice, or hers."

"So?!"

Hiei sighed. Arguing with this fox had gotten really annoying over the past few days. He went up to his room and got dressed.

"Shadow, I'm going to Reikai! I want this fox out of my head, now!" Hiei called. Shadow had caught up to him, fully dressed and ready to go, before he even reached the door. Of course, that was because he had to wake up Shuichi and wait for him to dress so he could drag him up to Reikai. While they were waiting, Shadow woke Eclipse and she got ready, too. Just to go along for the heck of it, maybe.

"Let's go," he said once the human was out of his room. "This fox is going back where he belongs if it have to do it myself." And the group walked out the door.

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Thank you very much to cat, who gave me one idea that ended up being practically the whole chapter. ^_^ I know I said this whole chapter would be Hiei and Youko arguing, and there was a lot of it, but I decided that they had to have something to argue over, so I added some random little stuffs in. The pizza is gonna have a part later in the story (a small part, but it will have a part. Nothing important, really, either, but a random thought was written at the bottom of my story, and I decided to use it.)

And I seriously am trying to work on 'Work Sucks,' but I ran into a giant cement writer's block, and all I have to break through it is a pointed rock and a hammer… Primitive chisel. Damn. Well, I could hit a weak spot and the whole thing would crumble. You never know. I'll keep trying… ^.~

Review, people!