Author note: so does this site still have active people on it? Is there a YYH group writing and reading fics? Every time I post I don't get a single response, I'm just curious?

CHAPTER 2

Just to make a point of how much he had to do, Hiei never went home to Demon World that night. It wouldn't have made any difference to Mukuro: she laughed at curfews. But he just wanted to make a point. And anyway,Yusuke was still in the process of setting up his ramen business and needed someone to try everything on his menu to make sure it wasn't total crap. Hiei just couldn't resist loading up on free noodles. Afterward, he guzzled cheap corner-store sake because he didn't know what the quality stuff was supposed to taste like, so it was just fine by him.

By midnight they were both drunk and playing hide and seek at an outside shopping center, which was not a fair game to play with Hiei because he could flash out of hiding places any time Yusuke came stumbling too near. Yusuke was starting to realize this, too, and didn't appreciate it.

"Do you have to cheat because your hiding places are so lame?" He wondered.

"My hiding places are f-flawless, thank you," Hiei answered, suddenly right beside him. Yusuke slowly came to realize he needed to shake his head to process this. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked about ten times in a row.

"J-Jesus, Hiei."

Hiei's giggle was rich and sudden, like someone had stomped on a ketchup bottle. Giggling between the two of them was extremely contagious, so Yusuke started doing it too.

Then Hiei was sure that he had heard his sister's voice traveling through his telepathic tunnels. As in trying for his attention. This was all still a new thing they had been trying with his Jagan – her talking at it rather than him eavesdropping – and he would have needed to stand still and focus even if he wasn't dancing atop alcoholic lily-pads. "Wow, man, you look so serious," Yusuke told him. It was true he had some kind of Resting Murder Face.

"It's Yukina," he explained, without blinking. This was reassuring to Yusuke: there was no way he wanted to murder his own sister.

Hiei turned to his partner in drink and grumbled a question: more to himself than to Yusuke, even though he was looking him straight in the eye: "why did I say yes about this shit?"

Yusuke didn't know how to answer.

"Oh, no, I wasn't— Look, I'll be there. Yup. Ughh.." His nostrils flared one more time before he told her goodnight.

Spring. Yes, another morning of spring, which tickled Yukina's fancy but just seemed outright offensive to Hiei as he was waiting at Genkai's doorstep in the same crumpled clothes he had gobbled ramen in the previous night. There was even a broth stain right over his stomach. The stark calls of birds marking their territory and begging for sex clattered at Hiei's ears as he stared deadpan into the window in the door and crammed his finger into the bell switch. He could hear it blaring on and on like the horn of in incoming train before Genkai just manifested in front of the empty reception way. He cursed himself for flinching as she swung open the door.

"Sheesh! Couldn't you have had better manners and jumped through a window or something?"

"Leave a window open, and I'd be happy to."

She squinted before she let him in. "Did you eat yet? There's food in the kitchen." She hadn't said she was teaching him yet, so he didn't make any indication that he was heading there. "AH AH AH. Get those filthy boots off."

He stopped to look over his shoulder. "I thought we were leaving soon."

"If it's too much trouble to put them back on again, you can go to the store in your socks, but the shoes come off here!" She pointed an indignant finger at the floor long enough to convince Hiei to pick his battles.

Two clunks later, he was shoving breakfast biscuits in his mouth when Yukina sneaked up on him. "So you like themmmm!" She squeaked, eyes all a-glitter, and hair done differently. She had... street clothes... Jeans, a sweater, sneakers... It always took him by surprise to see her in them. Nevertheless, a faint smile that she would have to take as her "good morning" spread across his lips. "I made them. Take as many as you like."

He had already been doing that. He handed one to her instead, just as she was glancing inside a cute little metallic blue purse she had slung on her shoulder. She took it and returned a smile.

"They're delicious. Where's teacher?" Hiei wondered.

"Oh, she's out in the garden watering her plants. She does it every morning, same time," she answered. Well that's just fascinating, he thought.

"Let me get this straight. You melted her with your puppy eyes and now she wants to buy me stuff?"

As she chewed down her biscuit, Yukina nodded with increasing trust in the situation, but he just stared at her with his lips parted. The incredulous words on his tongue had to stay there because their chaperone was back again, and if she was ready to go than everybody else had to be too.

"What would possess you to think I would get into that?!" Hiei screeched, loudly and angrily enough to startle all of the birds settled atop the trees obscuring Genkai's old, rusty pedo-van. Yukina had climbed obediently into the back and buckled herself into a heart-patterened booster seat, and now it was Hiei's turn to climb into the Spiderman one. "I WILL NOT."

All Genkai did was glare at Yukina to get her brother in line.

"Please, Hiei. We could get pulled over without it."

"Why?! She's smaller than us!"

"I have my own, thank you," Genkai piped up, crossing her arms, not even bothering to look at him.

Hiei just stared into the air for a while. He was too hung over to entirely wrap his brain around this. "Okay fine, but I'm not using the buckle."

Neither of the ladies seemed to protest, so they all hopped in.

Twenty minutes later, the van had careened, and swerved, and cut off a number of other cars before they arrived at the nearest market. Then it took Genkai about three times to get it straight into a handicap parking spot. Even Yukina kind of wanted to kiss the ground once she was let out.

A security personnel had been watching the whole struggle and was even more taken aback when two red-eyed "children" came hopping out the door, though Hiei just glared at him. Then he turned to his sister, who turned to empty air. Then a whole lot of clatter started coming from the back of the van.

Genkai had about four plastic bags the size of haystacks full of tin cans. Cold brew coffee, it would seem. "You drink this shit?" Slipped out of Hiei's mouth, to Yukina's amusement. The irony was not lost on her: she had seen him eat crickets off the ground before. Genkai, meanwhile, didn't acknowledge his impudence.

"Yukina, be a dear and help him pick out his school supplies. Do you have the lists I wrote?"

"Of course, of course!"

"The supplies, aaaand...?"

"The groceries. Yes~!" Yukina did a whole lot of awkward chuckling to herself as she pulled two papers from her purse.

"I'll be at the machines, wracking up some mula—"

"Excuse me?" Hiei interrupted, but no one seemed to hear.

"Then I'm buying scratch-its and sitting at the cafe. You'll have that done in an hour?"

"Yes, of course."

"Wait a minute!" Hiei snapped, yet unaware just how strong Genkai's selective hearing was.

"Good girl." With his teeth clenched, he watched her haul two of the bags off over each shoulder, though she was so much smaller than them that by a certain distance it looked like they were dragging themselves.

Hiei crossed the automatic doors and went stomping into the market as if he knew where he was going. Yukina, meanwhile, followed behind, attempting to bring up the content of her lists. "That woman acts like the entire universe was created to do her bidding!" In her softest voice, his sister tried to quell his flames.

"That's just how old people are, Hiei..."

"If I ever become old, shoot me. Poison me. Whatever's convenient," he told her, snatching an apple off a display and taking a huge, crunchy bite out of it." Yukina almost jumped on his arm to conceal the evidence from passersby.

"Hiei, you have to pay for that first!"

He chewed several times while making solid eye contact with her before he swallowed. The tremor in his brow gave away that in very short time he would find something else to bitch about, so Yukina flapped the lists in his face. "Put the apple in a bag and let's get started on this!" Hiei was not yet swayed.

"This is how you pay for her lessons? By becoming her peon?!" Yukina found herself in a rare moment where she rolled her eyes.

"Stop being dramatic!" She told him, in a tender way he had never heard it before, and maybe for the first time in his life he worried maybe he was being dramatic. "She's not forcing you to do this, Brother. You're helping me. ...Won't you?"

All the air that had been building up in his lungs flushed out in a groan he tried to keep quiet. He snatched up the list and squinted at it.

"What the hell!" It was an absolute mystery to Yukina how he had not died yet from the exhaustion of perpetual outrage. "Why would she need 20 cans of string beans?! And 25 bags of rice?! And what is... Mucinex?!"

She had to explain to him that Genkai avoided the store, and she wanted the twins to fetch her enough that she wouldn't have to come back until the summer. "I think it's smart and thrifty," she told him. "We fill the whole pantry. And she plays a mean coupon game!" For a second, it looked like Yukina believed she could impress Hiei with this fact, but he didn't know what coupons were. "How about we split up? You get all the boxes and cans, and I'll get the home goods and the weird stuff. How's that?"

Hiei frowned in compliance.

And so, off they went on their separate ways. Hiei had kept the list so close to his nose, he was more or less swerving blindly down the isles, unconcerned about any bodies that might end up in his path. He was not as terrible at locating items as he had thought. Before even a half hour had passed, he had whizzed through the store, stacking up all of Genkai's weird foods past the top of his cart. The thing became a menace to steer, but he was almost done. Only a few more things.

"Where would I find flaxmeal? What the hell is flaxmeal?"He muttered, turning the corner, when his ear caught the tail end of a question posed by a regretfully familiar voice. He looked up from the list.

Fuck, it was Kuwabara!

With Kurama?!

Picking out... cheese or something?!

"I mean, there's no reason we only have to pick one," Kuwabara rasped out, making anything sound stupid.

"No, certainly not," Kurama concurred. "Variety is very much key in so many aspects of life." They both nodded and seemed to believe he had just revealed a grand nugget of wisdom, so Kuwabara put the cheese he had been examining into their shared basket.

THAT WAS A WHOLE CAN OF 'NOPE' RIGHT THERE. Before they could notice him, he huffed and puffed and heaved his cart into a U-turn to find respite down the cereal isle.

Once he came rolling up in a fury Yukina, she had been distracted by cute socks and slippers some time ago and was startled by his sudden, squeaky arrival. "Hey!" He called. "Let's get out of here!" His eyes were dodgy and he was squeezing the handle of the cart in a death grip. "I'm done. Are you done? Let's go."

"But w-we still need your school supplies!"

"Right. Let's get on with it." He shot his head left and right to make sure they weren't being watched before he wheeled the cart away again, already having the whole store memorized.

According to her list, he needed a notebook, a calculator, pencils, sticky notes... He just started throwing anything in the basket that vaguely resembled these things while Yukina tried to make sure they were what he wanted. He insisted, but she just hid a smile from him for unshared reasons, which was more than irritating but would have to wait.

They found Genkai sipping a Starbucks near check out, who didn't even bat a lash that they were seeming to race for her with carts stacked higher than their heads. She knew the little person life too well.

She pulled out her trusty credit card and shepherded them into line at the registers. The coast seemed clear to Hiei, so he rammed the cart in and started piling all of her crap onto the conveyor belt. It was at this time that fate shoved his greatest frenemies back into his face, and before he knew it some sort of Hallmark-flavored reunion was happening at the checkstand. Kuwabara had guppy eyes for his sister and was discreetly checking her out; Kurama was pretending to have a civil conversation with Genkai while seeming to ask Hiei questions nonverbally with his eyes, like about what in the world he was doing there taking care of her groceries.

To make it worse, they were both dressed like Calven Klein models, like ridonkulously well, to the point that Hiei could envision just how much time and money they might have spent on those particular outfits and it was infuriatingly frivolous. For a while, there, Hiei was just idling with his hands in his pockets, squinting at them, trying to find a single wrinkle in their shirts, or a bit of lent on Kurama's fancy wool pea-coat. AHA. Found one. Ffff, not so perfect now... ah, Kurama?!

"Yes, Kazuma's taking his finals this week and we have some special plans to celebrate," he told them, perking up Hiei's ears. The phrase sounded like a scandal coming off that fox's tongue, which he was being purposefully vague about, probably.

"On that note, why dont you explain yourselves. I haven't seen you since the Christmas party," Genkai told him.

"You... wanted to see us?" Kuwabara wondered. It was pretty hard to tell.

"Of course I did, you silly boys. How am I supposed to know how you're doing if you don't come and visit every now and then?!"

"Um, ma'am, the total will be 56,900 yen, please—" the cashier intervened.

"—Yeah, whatever." She practically threw the card at him.

"Let us help you with that," Kurama started, "if you can stand to wait a moment." He set the basket that he had been sharing with Kuwabara onto the belt and got his wallet ready.

"Kurama," Kuwabara protested under his breath, painfully close to his ear. Kurama was smiling about it, though.

"I've got it," he assured him.

"But it's not even—"

"I've got it."

Hiei simply glared at this interaction while Genkai was having a football field length receipt printed.

Evidently, his sister did not know the exact reason for his moodiness, but it only got worse the closer the group came to Genkai's pedo-van. He had tried to steer them out the door before Kurama had finished paying for Kuwabara's stupid cheeses. He had taken off with the carts so they wouldn't be able to help. He had opted to run back to the compound instead of being seen climbing into the booster seat. He wouldn't explain it to her, though. She would just have to wonder.