As Miel stares blankly at the limp figure on the ground, she vaguely acknowledges that she is experiencing symptoms of shock, but she still can't move. Every fiber of her being is screaming at her to run as far and as fast as she can, to forget this ever happened and move on. But yet, she still stands there. And then, a horrifying thought occurs to Miel: What if he was human? Even as she poses this question to herself, she knows it can't be true, but she has no explanation as to what she killed. Surely this is not an animal she has ever encountered, or even heard about, but it can't possibly have been a human.
During Miel's musings as to the origins and intentions of the creature sprawled lifeless at her feet, the feeling that someone is watching her encompasses Miel. Shivers tingle up her spine as the feeling grows more intense. Miel focuses her concentration onto this feeling and soon detects a direction from which the stare is coming. Very swiftly she whips around to stare into the eyes of her stalker.
Those eyes!
Miel gasps in recognition of the very eyes that have been disturbing her dreams for almost four months now. She fails to realize, in all her epiphanic glory, that while she is staring most definitely into the eyes of the man in her dreams, that stare is aimed tree stories up in a tree a half mile away. She can see the eyes as well as if he were standing four feet away from her, and in the blink of an eye, he actually is standing four feet in front of her.
Miel blinks at the sudden shift in proximity, and pulls herself slightly more upright. Before she can blink again, the stranger takes a step towards her. At his advance, Miel is snapped back into reality, she accepts that she could be in real danger. Why do I think this of this man I've been dreaming about, but oddly enough was not as threatened by the beast that attacked me? Miel pushes her confused thoughts aside, and retreats a step back, as she does this the man takes another step forward.
Before Miel has time enough to think about protecting herself, the man snatches her hands, and tosses her onto his back as if she weighs nothing, grasping her hands on both sides of his head so she can't escape. With dizzying speed, this perplexing man takes off, making the normally serene surrounding of trees, animals, and underbrush blur together in streaks of green and brown. Miel is so dumbstruck she just rides on his back for a while. When her senses finally return to her, Miel begins to think of a way to escape the clutches of her kidnapper, however is thwarted when he throws her down onto a pile of leaves in a cave.
No matter how soft that leaf-pile is, Miel still loses her breath and hits her head on the hard ground. Before the blackness completely overtakes her, Miel manages to see the dark stranger walk towards her. The last thing she saw before passing out didn't look happy or nice.
As consciousness sneaks back in, so does memory, and the cold of the cave. Miel doesn't move for fear that the man is still there. Instead she tries to keep her breathing as even as possible as she listens for signs of his presence, and as she does this she realizes that her wrists and ankles are bound. Miel hears nothing but the sounds of nature, and begins to believe that he has left her there to die, or will be back. Before she can move, however, the man speaks from behind her, causing her heart to leap to her throat and a shriek to be pushed from the same area.
The man sounds slightly amused as he speaks while rolling her over to face him, "I said that I'm glad you're awake."
Miel stares at the kidnapper and ponders if he really is glad that she's awake, and if that should scare her. As she stares she takes in his appearance. He has spiky, black hair, a fair complexion, big, beautiful eyes, a straight nose, and a mouth almost painfully feminine and full. He is wearing lose-fitting black pants, a black, fitted t-shirt that is showing off nicely toned arms and torso, and a singular strip of white fabric is pulled across his forehead ninja style and tied at the back of his head. His height, from what she can tell, is about an inch or two taller than hers making him 5'2", or somewhere around there.
Anyone else looking at the man in front of her would see nothing abnormal, but Miel senses something dangerous about this man, and cannot help but fear what is coming. As she tries desperately not to shake from shear anticipation of what will happen, because she is indeed more frightened of the waiting than the act, the man continues to speak to her.
"Now, since I have the upper hand at the moment, you will be so kind as to answer some questions I have, won't you?" Though he posed it as a question, Miel has the distinct impression that it is rhetorical. She is proven correct as he continues with his first question, "Let's start with a name shall we? You do have one I assume."
Though she itched to reply, "You know what they say when you assume…" she refrained and answered him truthfully, saying, "My name is Miel L'Ensoileille."
At hearing this the man replied, "Hn… Sunlit Honey."
The fact that he understood French enough to know the meaning of her name surprised her. Miel had never encountered anyone else here that knew French, let alone that French is the linguistic origin of her name. Impressed, Miel smiles, but she still is frightened so she asks her own question, "Since you now know my name, it would only be polite if I could know yours as well."
The man arches an eyebrow at this, although he responds anyway, "My name is Jaganshi Hiei, but you may call me Hiei."
"Very well then, Hiei, I am going to ask another question," Miel declares bodly, and again Hiei arches his brow but allows her to continue, "Why have you tied me up and are you going to kill me?" Miel pauses as she considers what she has just said, and continues, "Actually that was two questions but when you think about it they are directly related to each other considering that if you're going to kill me, you might as well get it over with and then it doesn't matter why I'm tied up. Though if you were honorable, you'd untie me and let me have a fighting chance, or at least the hope to think I might live if I get away, and don't listen to me because I babble when I'm nervous and you're a very imposing person." All of this was said in one breath, in a stream of non-stop words.
Besides his arching brow, the edges of Hiei's mouth tilt upward at this news, but so that one can't really tell if he is amused or royally pissed off. He approaches Miel, and as he does so, he flicks his katana from its sleeve. "I have one more question for you," he says menacingly, "do you know what you killed back there?"
Miel blinks at the topic of the question and screws her faced into an expression of utter confusion, "No…" Getting excited, she continues with another question, "Why, do you!"
Hiei takes his katana and for a moment Miel wishes she hadn't said anything, but as she is kissing her life goodbye, Hiei takes her hands and slices the ropes between her wrists, then moves to her feet to do the same to the ropes at her ankles. Miel looks up at him, puzzled as to what to do next.
Hiei sheaths his katana and tells her, "You're gonna come with me to see Koenma. The little prince should know what to do with you."
As Hiei goes to take her hand again, Miel snatches it away, suddenly afraid again. She's just getting used to her first kidnapper, she doesn't want to meet an accomplice. She begins to run away, but Hiei is fast and easily runs next to her with a patient expression of patronization on his face. Miel speeds up and so does Hiei, she speeds up again, he matches her, she speeds up more and he starts to fall behind. She speeds up once more and is about to take off towards home when she is stopped dead in her tracks by a horrible ringing noise in her ears.
Covering her ears and closing her eyes Miel wills the sound to go away, but it just gets louder and louder, more abrasive to her eardrums. As she is squirming because of the noise something hits her arm.
Miel is jolted awake by a bump to her arm from a passing student and she realizes that everything she thought just happened, hasn't happened. At least not yet. Miel grabs her things and heads out of the classroom. As she walks through the courtyard she doesn't bother checking her stuff because she knows she already has it all. She spies her cousin before he sees her; she wants to see if her dream was correct or not, and changing the circumstances might change the course of events, so she finds something to feign interest in.
Like clockwork, Yusuke places himself in front of Miel, just like in her dream, she bumps into him, just like in her dream, and he grunts, just like in her dream.
"Miel, you need to pay more attention to where you are going. That almost hurt," Yusuke says in a whining tease as he brushes off his chest.
Miel is shocked for a moment at the accuracy of her sleep-time imaginings, then takes off running down the pathway hoping the rest isn't true. As Yusuke sputters after her, Miel throws back a distracted, "Can't talk Yusuke, I'm late!"
As the demon, as Hiei called it, crumples to the ground, Miel immediately turns to look at Hiei, and instead of waiting for him to come to her, she takes off at her fastest, which is easier to reach now because she knows she can do it, and meets him on his tree branch.
"Hello Hiei," Miel says to the slightly startled male in front of her.
Before Hiei can respond, Miel takes off towards the cave, and Hiei does exactly what she wants him to: he follows her.
She gets to the cave first, and has enough time to sit on the floor leaning against a wall of the cave. When Hiei approaches he slows down and comes towards her warily. Miel chuckles at this and tells him, logically, "You were watching me. I killed the demon and came right to you. Do you really think I had time to set up a trap?"
Hiei grunts in response to her question, not admitting that he did or didn't think that, but instead counters with his own question, "What are you…?"
Miel doesn't know exactly how to respond to that, and in fact, it makes her ask the same question about Hiei. But she doesn't want to give up her upper hand, so instead, Miel responds, "What does it matter? All you need to do is take me to Koenma."
Miel and Hiei blink in unison at what she just said. Hiei in shock that she knows he is connected with Koenma, and Miel because she was so scared of whoever Koenma was before, but now she is absolutely sure that she needs to see him.