Disclaimer: YuYu Hakusho belongs to Yoshihiro Togashi
For Adi88, who forced the old plot-bunny underlying this to fruition by repeatedly making me prove that Yukina is far cooler than her roles in YYH often make her appear.
Fatalistic
Hina is afraid of the baby.
She has been brought back to her room, and the boy is gone now. Only a single hiruseki is left now, with the girl.
When she held her son, just for a moment, she felt like she would melt, consumed by his blazing warmth. Once ice, now water, ready to start anew. It was the same strange feeling as the man from outside the glacier.
But now the burning boy has been ripped from her womb and tossed from the sky. Not even ashes are left.
When she picks up her daughter, holds the soft blanket wrapped more gently than the wards had been, it is the first time in a long while that Hina feels nothing. And it terrifies her; the baby horrifies her.
The cold mind she was born with scolds her to set the bundle down before her trembling arms drop it.
The baby girl—Yukina—opens eyes that are red as smoldering embers. She is not born with nearly the self-aware alertness of her brother, but she lacks the sluggish cold-blood of a koorime newborn as well.
Hina then realizes that the fault does not lie in the baby. She cannot blame or hate Yukina for stimulating no feelings in her. The fault lies within herself, within every koorime heart that is too icy for love.
She sets the baby on the bed, staring blankly at pale hands wracked with shivers. She cannot bear the cold now that they have quenched the closest remaining thing she had to fiery passion.
When the eldest koorime said Hina had come to her senses and committed suicide because she could not bear the shame, it was very nearly the truth.
(line)
She would never have known if she had not touched him. But he is the spark that singes through the cloth knot, and now the blindfold has fallen from her eyes.
The eldest koorime will sometimes leave the glacier, and she brings back harsh stories of the foolish world beyond. It was always truth. And perhaps now, Rui thinks, it was also a ploy to keep them from deserting the village.
But with the blindfold burned away, she suddenly knows the despair of the snow that falls outside the ice world and melts with spring. Only in the glacier is ice eternal.
Yet the crystals persistently return to fall again. Their existence is brief, but the cycle eternal.
Hiei's burning potential must be true life. But they have swallowed him up, taken his spark to prolong their own empty survival.
They do not deserve it, because they cannot truly live—the koorime can only exist.
Hina, she realizes, will feel this even more deeply, because she carried the blazing baby inside her. Rui cannot give in, because someone must bring up the baby girl.
She will live for Yukina until then. Then, she whispers to Hiei, tucking away his birthright, he is to come back for his revenge.
"Please, kill me first."
(line)
She stares out the tower window to a world of blue sky and white clouds, and it reminds her of ice. She wonders briefly what has become of the village since she left.
Rui explained that it was a slim hope. She has faith, if they are simply patient and wait. There is no need to locate him. And after all, why would he keep the name the hated koorime gave him?
No, Yukina thinks, the koorime called him "Forbidden Child." It was his mother who named him, his mother who had sobbed and died when Yukina was an infant, still in a slushy state of half-awareness, while he burned so brightly.
With these clues, she left the glacier. When Yukina was captured, she had been looking for "Hiei."
Now she sits alone in Tarukane's stronghold. She loves the little birds that keep her company, the only reminder she has that she shares her brother's warm heart.
So she knows that heat is not the reason they sought to kill him.
The koorime tossed him away because he was a taint that ruined the snowy purity of their heritage. They viciously protected this to retain their hiruseki tears.
Yukina despises the crystals. But Tarukane cannot be allowed to have them.
She resists, because the blood price of the valuable jewels is even greater than he could ever understand.
And because she refuses to give in—will not, cannot—she must harden her heart and freeze her emotions. She becomes as expressive as the glacier of her birthplace.
Despite the drops of fiery blood, despite her ability to love, in those moments she is a true koorime.
When she was first ambushed, she avoided fighting because of her gentle heart.
Now, though, she does not fight back because she has become just like the koorime. And that means she does not deserve to survive. She does not deserve to be freed.
Hiei has always been her spark of hope. It seems a fitting analogy, from everything Rui has told her. A brightly burning baby boy.
The koorime, with their hollow hearts, are condemned to eternal icy emptiness. But his murderous fire will set them free.
Hiei is her hope, because he is their salvation.
She does not deserve a rescue. If she cannot redeem the glacial village by cleansing all their icy hearts with fire, then she will pay with her own.
…
Owari
…
-Windswift