Sagaku would have told Hiei that she didn't need to be carried, but he'd never offered simple comfort willingly before. If he took his arms from her, she was afraid she would float away or sink down into the ground and never come back up-two extremes and she couldn't decide which was more likely. She would have told him about how she still emailed Shoseki and Mineo once a week, how they called whenever they could find the time. They were like brothers that actually cared about her. And they understood her more than anyone else could; they understood her better than even her sisters did. She needed them. And now they were gone.
Hiei carried the girl into the room she had left only a month ago. She clutched him tightly, her fingers relaxing and digging into his shoulders harder with each shuddering breath. When he tried to drop her on the bed, she clutched him all the harder.
"Onna," he grunted, "you have to let go of me."
Tears began spilling from her eyes and she released her grip so abruptly he nearly dropped her. Hiei hesitated. Should he pull away now? This was a gray area the fox hadn't addressed. Was it better to comfort the girl or leave her to her own misery so as to avoid any misled emotions? The uncertainty made him grumpier than usual. And uncomfortable. But mostly grumpy.
With a tentative idea in his head, Hiei slipped past the shields of Sagaku's mind. It wasn't easy to pinpoint the source of her pain; it seemed to be stemming from several places at once. One of those pains was a physical one, something that hadn't healed properly in her chest. The other pains were the feelings of abandonment, the shock and sadness of losing family-figures, and guilt for disrupting the lives of others. Shocking to Hiei was that she wanted to be held by anyone-even him-so long as that person could drain the pain from her.
Hiei sat on the bed, pulling his legs up while she cried. He couldn't bring himself to put his arms around her. Palpable though her pain was, Kurama's warnings were still fresh on his mind. Until he figured out what to do with the rabbit demon, the safest course of action seemed to be to do as little as possible.
When Kurama arrived at Hiei's house, entering without so much as a knock on the door, he was greeted by the sight of Hiei sitting awkwardly on the bed near Sagaku-but not touching- while the girl tried to dam her tears. Kurama sighed heavily. Of course, Hiei wouldn't be able to comfort Sagaku. This wasn't the type of pain that could be defeated with fire and steel.
"Shh, Sagaku," Kurama crooned to the girl. She crept off the bed, slinking to him. He lifted his arms for her, wrapping them around her to pull her close.
Hiei glared at the fox. It was so easy for him to comfort the girl, so natural.
"It's going to be okay," Kurama kept muttering into the girl's hair. Slowly, her tears dried out. If not for the shaky breaths, she could almost pass as normal.
"How did they die?" Sagaku asked, pressing her face into Kurama's jacket lest she begin to cry again.
Hiei bit back the remark that danced on his tongue-everyone died. Did it matter how these particular two bit the dust? The fox narrowed his eyes at Hiei, as if sensing the thought.
"I know it doesn't seem fair," Kurama began. Sagaku pulled back, interrupting the flow of comforting words.
"It's not fair, you're right," she said, "but that's not what I'm asking. They may have been scholars but they weren't pushovers. And there were two of them. How were they killed?"
Sagaku pulled back further. Kurama's hands fell to his sides. Sagaku ignored both Kurama and Hiei, neither of which had an answer, and began pacing back and forth. Words poured from her mouth, echoing her pain, but they were meaningless. Shoseki and Mineo were dead, no matter what words she uttered now. Her breathing grew more ragged with each round.
"Sagaku, you're going to hurt yourself," Kurama tried to calm the girl. "Your breathing doesn't sound right."
Sagaku whirled in her track, turning angrily on Kurama. Before she could bite out harsh words she would certainly regret later, Hiei appeared behind her. He wrapped his warm fingers very firmly against her mouth.
"I'm putting her to bed," Hiei said calmly, as if he did not have a very angry demoness in his hand.
Kurama watched Hiei as the fire demon pushed the girl forward, not once loosening her hand. An amused smile crept onto Hiei's lips though. Kurama wondered what invectives Sagaku was calling Hiei in her mind.
"Sleep," he told the girl once he'd shoved her in his room. "Or at least stay in here until you're not going to say something you regret."
Sagaku glared at Hiei, but he remained unmoved. He pointed firmly at the mattress, and then turned and closed the door behind him. He didn't move, crossing his arms to stare at Kurama, silently daring the girl to try to escape. She didn't. After a few moments, he heard the light creak of her sitting on the bed.
Unbidden, Hiei hoped her scent would linger in his pillows longer this time. Annoying as it had been at first, it was even more annoying now that it was gone.
Sagaku did not sleep. She fumed, first because Hiei had sent her to the room like a troubled child, and second because nobody seemed to be able to tell her why her friends were killed, or even how. And then, as that anger died away, shame crept up in its place. She had broken down, a full-on meltdown, in front of them. It was entirely improper, and embarrassing to boot.
The shame seemed to be the key to releasing rational thought again. Shoseki must have been asking questions, sending out feelers past Nenriki. If he wasn't killed for the information in his books, he must have been killed for the information he was seeking.
When Sagaku finally built up the nerve to creep from her Hiei-imposed-time-out, anger seemed to simmer in the living room. Whatever Hiei and Kurama were discussing, though, was halted when she snuck into the room. Anger meant heat, though, and Sagaku craved that now almost as badly as when she was in heat.
Without worrying about the conversation she'd interrupted, Sagaku pushed between the two demons, touching neither.
"I don't want to be alone," she said. It didn't sound strong, but at least it wasn't a whimper.
"Sagaku," Kurama sighed, "we can't sleep with you."
"Then I won't sleep," she said stubbornly. The very tip of her nose twitched, but other than that she stood as still as a statute. The comfortable scent of her two friends (although "friend" might be a stretch for Hiei) washed over her. She wiggled her body a little, firming her stance.
"Good going, fox," Hiei snapped.
"Shut up, Hiei," Kurama snapped back with uncharacteristic sharpness.
What Sagaku really wanted to do was cuddle up to one man or the other and cry herself to sleep. Instead, she glared from one to the other. The effect was not lost on either male; Sagaku's eyes were rimmed in red, swollen from crying and hollow from exhaustion and pain.
"You need to sleep," Kurama tried to reason with her, "you're not done healing yet. You've been sleeping alone for over a year now, this is no different."
"Actually," Sagaku corrected him, "Shoseki and Mineo let me sleep with them when it got bad."
Kurama's emerald eyes, though concerned, were unmoving. Until today she would have called him her best friend. Now, she felt like he didn't understand her at all. Why - seriously, why? -did he think it had to mean something if she slept on the floor beside one of them? She was asking for no more comfort than that.
Sagaku turned to meet Hiei's eyes instead, hoping to find more sympathy there. The red depths were unfathomable.
"Please," Sagaku pleaded with both of them-or either of them, she didn't honestly know at this point, "please. I'll fall apart alone. I'm falling apart now."
"I know Hiei used you, Sagaku," Kurama said. His voice cracked in something akin to discomfort. "It cannot go any further!"
Sagaku stared up at Kurama, wondering when he'd lost his cool. Though he normally smelled of dirt and roses, and very faintly of fox, the predator's scent was stronger now. Sharper. She wanted to scream and rage at him, try to force him to see that he was wrong. But she couldn't do that. Wrong or not, Kurama honestly thought he was protecting his friend. The idiot.
"For your information," Sagaku said icily (because though she could respect that Kurama thought he was doing the right thing, she was furious that he thought he knew better than her), "I was using him."
And then, because there was nothing left to say, Sagaku spun on heel and stalked to Hiei's room. She slammed the door shut, hard enough to make the windows in the house rattle. Hiei and Kurama stared at each other, silently daring the other to continue the argument now. When neither did, Kurama spread his blankets on the floor.
Sagaku didn't sleep. She did spend a while rubbing her face into the sheets and pillows, because foolish though it made her feel she did derive some comfort from that warm, smoky smell. When that didn't work enough to let her sleep, she sat up and meditated on her jasper. She breathed in, focusing on that pulse and letting it feel her heartbeat. Like all her stones, it opened to her, sharing its properties. She wasn't supposed to do this. How many times had Shoseki impressed on her that nature always won out? Letting the stone absorb her pain and soothe bruises was one thing. This was different. The healing process it had already started sped now, fed by her coaxing. It wasn't perfect-Sagaku was no doctor-but at least if anyone came she wouldn't be handicapped by injuries.
The poor jasper couldn't heal all the hurt in her chest-it tried, but stones are not known for their adaptation to new situations and emotional pain was outside the stone's realm.
Then, because the healing process had been helped as much as it could, Sagaku let herself slip into that half-wakeful state of mind where the whispery thoughts that were usually drowned in observations and actions could come to the forefront.
The next morning, Sagaku asked Kurama and Hiei for a bowl of salt water. It was supplied to her with a raised eyebrow from Kurama. Sagaku took the bowl into Hiei's room, closing the door once more. It was petty, she knew, but they had closed her out last night so today she did the same to them.
Sagaku took the time to place each stone, one at a time, in the bowl of water and meditate on purifying them. Last, she pulled the dagger from her belt. The stone had lightened some since it had absorbed her brother's life force. Dare she purify it? Contemplating it felt oddly like cutting off the last familial tie she had. And, she reasoned, it would rust the blade.
Realizing her own folly, Sagaku dropped the dagger into the bowl before she could change her mind. The stone was not her family. It was not her brother, or a connection to her long-dead mother. It was just a stone.
Having never purified her stones before, though she and Shoseki had theorized how, Sagaku wasn't sure what to expect when she put them back on. The change was subtle; were it not for the serpentine, which was as familiar as her own skin, she might not have noticed it at all. The pulse was still there, and when she reached out she could feel the protective nature of the stone and that tickle in her spine that oddly made her think of the night's with Hiei. What she didn't feel was that sense of herself, like looking into a dirty spoon's reflection where there was just a glimpse of what might have been her.
Shoseki had been right. When they meditated on the stones, or called on the stone's properties, they were feeding their own energy into the stones. Her stones were in their pure form, once more, untainted by her weaknesses.
Sagaku cried again, then; her first thought had been to email Shoseki and tell him what she learned.
Hiei and Kurama both could hear Sagaku crying in the other room, but when Kurama tentatively touched the door knob, he found the door locked.
Kurama and Hiei alternated going out and performing the necessary tasks: patrolling the apartment lest anyone was poking around, and reporting to their teammates each day.
Sagaku spent days out in the main room with them, tucking her legs into herself and staring into space or asking them to escort her outside so she could exercise. It made Hiei feel sick-this dull, husk of a girl was not the vibrant and annoying onna he had come to tolerate. She was like a paper person, those things young females cut out of colored sheets and treated like dolls.
Kurama, though not a mind-reader, was more privy to Sagaku's thoughts. He recognized them because they were normal. She was working through the stages of grief. When he tried to broach the topic with her, though, she shot him the most scornful look any hanshoku had ever managed and stopped him in his tracks. The message was clear enough: talk is cheap.
Finally, Hiei could take no more of the girl's listlessness. Even when Kurama forced food on her, she didn't really react. He waited until the fox had gone to patrol the apartment once more. Then, alone but for the girl, he strode right up to her. She looked up with a bland expression.
"Onna," Hiei said to her. "Something's wrong with you." He was hoping to provoke a response from her. He got it.
"What's wrong with me?" the shorter demon hissed at him, clutching her serpentine in her hand. "You think that because I'm mourning, there's something wrong?"
"Since when do you get angry?" Hiei asked, smirking because she'd proven his point. This wasn't quite a normal response.
"Of course I'm angry!" She snapped at him. She flung her hands up in disbelief, nearly hitting him in the face. Hiei smacked her hands back down.
"What are you angry at?" He asked viciously, poking and prodding so she would direct that anger.
Sagaku snarled at him, not wanting to admit that he was right-but just a little. She generally had no temper to speak of, and yet here she stood with a glower that would put even Genkai to shame.
"Right now, I'm angry at you!"
Hiei let her hands smack against his chest, pushing him back all of a centimeter. When his smirk grew, so did the anger in her eyes. She punched and kicked, finally venting the anger that had been so carefully tucked beneath the "proper" attitude. Hiei dodged her blows, slipping behind her before she could even turn.
"No, that's not right," he hissed in her ear.
Sagaku spun on Hiei, her hand flying out again. She expected him to dodge it. This time, though, he caught it and jerked her to him. Feet-too many to just be hers-tangled beneath her. She thrust her shoulder into his stomach since she was going down anyway.
"Trust me, that's it right now." Sagaku yelped as her back hit the wall. Her foot snapped out, aiming for his thigh, but he was suddenly too close. His hands pinned her shoulders to the wall, his legs effectively blocking hers from moving.
"Stop lying to yourself," he growled down at her. "You're mad at yourself, and you think that feeling guilty is the best punishment."
Sagaku snorted, wrapping one leg around his side as she tried to force him off balance.
"Know me so well, do you Hiei?" She winced as he pushed her harder against the wall, digging the back of her heel into the dip behind his knee.
"You send thoughts flying around so often it's all I can do to tune them out," Hiei sneered. It wasn't altogether true; she did broadcast exceptionally clear, but since she'd come back from America laden with stones he caught mostly white noise from her. "You think it's your fault the scholars were killed. You think if you had stayed with them they would still be alive. You're a fool. They would have killed you, too."
Sagaku howled in fury, swinging her other leg up. Her thighs pressed together around Hiei's waist, squeezing painfully. He snarled in her face, moving his grip closer to her throat.
"Admit!" he demanded. "Admit you're angry with yourself!"
"Only myself?" she snapped at him. Her hands moved to his wrists, digging in with her nails. He took the punishment without moving. "Not angry at you? And Koenma? How about Kurama, you're sure I'm not angry at him?" She was taunting him now, venom in her voice.
"Why be angry at us?" Hiei asked furiously. This was a turn he hadn't foreseen.
"Because!" She squeezed harder with her legs, driving her heel into his buttocks. He dug his thumb into her collarbone in retribution. "All you guys can think to do is protect me! Did you even care how I felt about the situation? But no, you have to stop the killers from getting what they want, no matter that it's me and I have feelings!"
Hiei's grip slackened a little, surprised as he was by this revelation.
"And you're worse than all of them!" Sagaku continued, really letting Hiei have it now. "You said it meant nothing, but then you always stare at me like I won't notice and yell at me if I get too close to anyone, and all because you think I'm a possession!" She drew in a deep breath. "I can't help being hanshoku, but I'm not going to be some tool, Hiei."
Her legs relaxed their grip, letting Hiei's sides relax again. She sniffed and wiped her hand across her nose before shoving him away. He let her. He let her stalk into his bedroom, slamming the door shut because there was nowhere else for her to go. Did the onna really think he thought of her as a possession? As a tool? When everything he did lately seemed to be to help her? The idiot.