School Daze

Chapter 02:

"Which Watch?"

Three days later, Hiei found himself in the presence of the prince of Spirit World once again. The toddler was sitting down this time, butt finally recovered from the punishment his father, King Enma, had inflicted upon it. The fire demon smirked, eyes glancing over the office like he owned it, and Koenma had to suppress a grin at the sight of Hiei's confidence.

He had no idea what was coming, did he?

Hiei broke the ice first, and kind of literally. "No ice baths this time?" he asked, maddeningly calm about the entire thing.

"No," Koenma said, eyebrow twitching. He regained his composure when he remembered what was in store for Hiei, and he smiled when he said: "Only humble pie." Brown eyes speared the SDF guards standing behind Hiei, and then he leveled a finger at the fire apparition, threw back his head, and screamed: "RESTRAIN HIM!"

The effects were instantaneous and unavoidable. Omura held out her hand, caught her hip-length chocolate brown braid in her fist, and then the braid lengthened and burst free of its confines with a rush of her spirit energy. It curled around her arm faster than any human eye could follow, twined around her fingers like eager snakes, and leapt straight through the air toward Hiei.

He tried dodging, of course, but since the attack had come from behind him and he only caught sight of it out of his periphery, Hiei was unable to get far enough to avoid having hair like spun steel wrap around his wrists and ankles, hoist him into the air, and hold him there as he kicked and cursed and tried to break free. "Put me down, you Spirit World bitch!" he snarled, and even though he knew the gesture was a futile one he let some of his fiery youkai, the kind he had been born with and the kind the Jagan had lessened and replaced with its own, burst out of his skin. The scent of scorched hair made everyone's face twist in discomfort, but Omura only sighed as her hair regenerated itself and gripped Hiei even tighter.

One of the other SDF members, the one with the blue eyes and white hair whose name Hiei could not recall, stepped forward and, without flinching, thrust out his open hand. Hiei tried to bite it when it came near his face, but the SDF-er only sighed, smiled, and wrapped his fingers tight around Hiei's throat. Hiei choked on his own words, face turning an alarming shade of puce.

"Struggle," the man said pleasantly, "and I'll squeeze your head off."

Hiei glared, sputtered, and went still. He didn't stop glaring, but since glaring is his face's natural habitat, that much is to be expected.

"Thank you for shutting him up, Inari!" Koenma said brightly, and he hopped onto his desk, spun around in a giddy circle, and bounded down onto the floor. Hiei's lip curled in disgust as the toddler-prince all but skipped across the room, face alight with dark, sadistic glee, and then Koenma reached into his pocket and smiled.

Hiei, for all he thought the prince looked ridiculous and weak, did not like the look of that smile.

"What I have in my pocket," Koenma began, still grinning his devil-befitting grin, "will break your pride in half, then make you crawl to me on your hands and knees and beg to be released from its effects." He raised the hand not shoved into his pocket so he could point menacingly into Hiei's face. "Prepare yourself, Hiei, for you are about to suffer the unimaginable."

Though he did not show it on his face, Hiei had begun to grow… trepidacious. He was not used to this.

"I've had the Spirit World's top technicians working on this for the past three weeks, day and night, with no rest," Koenma continued, enjoying his ability to draw out the suspense. "It was all for you, of course—all to make you as debased, embarrassed, and humiliated as possible."

By that point, he had become outright alarmed.

Koenma liked that. "More than one of the team collapsed from exhaustion from their efforts," he said, giggling, "but they did not work for nothing. What I am about to show you is quite possibly the finest piece of Spirit World technology ever created."

Inari, as interested as he was in crushing Hiei's windpipe, let his hand loosen as he listened to Koenma's promises. Hiei could breathe better, it was true, but that did not ease the sudden dryness in his mouth.

"Would you like a list of this item's benefits?" Koenma cooed. "Of course you would, since you'll be the first subject to experience it outside of a laboratory setting." He paused. "There may be a few bugs that need to be worked out, but I think you'll manage to survive them. Probably." He cackled aloud, eyes swimming in joyed tears. "Probably! Ha! That's rich!"

Omura, face composed, let out a small cough. She obviously wanted to see Hiei's fate as much as everyone else did. Probably not more than Hiei, though. He really wanted to know what he was going up against.

But despite the pointed hint, Koenma wasn't done drawing it out (really, he was having more fun than he'd had in ages). "And I should mention before I get to the nitty-gritty," he said, "that because of your, Hiei, I plan on incorporating this invention into all of my punishments. Your name will likely be cursed all over Demon World for being the one to inspire its creation!"

"Get to the point, you long-winded fool," Hiei growled. Inari shot him a dark look and squeezed Hiei's throat again, but Hiei bore that indignity with good grace (and a gob of spit in Inari's pretty-boy face, but since Omura stopped the man from killing Hiei, our beloved anti-protagonist, it's hardly worth mentioning at all).

Once the drama died down, Koenma carried on unperturbed. "As I was saying, the benefits! It's small, but its power is potent. It's easy to use, and even easier to activate. Even the stupidest of demons will be able to understand how to live with it! Even better is that the demon afflicted with this device cannot remove it without my express permission, because to do otherwise would result in instant incineration, but the best part…"

Everyone leaned forward, most with bated breath. Koenma reveled in the attention, chuckling and grinning and looking as pleased as punch.

"And the best part," he finally said, "is that it's painful."

Hiei's eyes widened (hey, there was little else for him to do!).

Koenma let out a high-pitched scream of a laugh. The hand in his pocket jerked upward, pudgy fist clenched tight as Koenma held it above his head and screeched: "Behold, Hiei, the instrument of your demise: THE DEMON'S BANE 2000!"

Then his hand opened.

Hiei, from his place in Inari's hold, stared. Then his face went from fiercely-brave-despite-the-total-hopelessness-of-the-situation, to I'm-not-sure-what-I'm-looking-at-it-but-it's-definitely-not-what-I-was-expecting confusion. Omura, meanwhile, gaped, and the heretofore-silent third SDF member looked stunned beneath his mop of green hair. Inari, however, being the least experienced of the three (he had only just made the SDF cut a month before, if you want to know the truth, but that's a story for another day) opened his mouth to speak.

"A wristwatch?" he asked. His hand dropped from Hiei's throat as he started to wildly gesticulate. "You're giving Hiei a wristwatch?"

A snake of Omura's hair promptly detached from Hiei, shot forward, and slammed into Inari's toe, but the youngster just glared at her and said: "I thought we were punishing him, not accessorizing him! What is this, Queer Eye for the Demonic Felon? Where's the blood, the spikes, the—"

Koenma went red across the face and lowered his hand, clutching the wristwatch—because that's exactly what it looked like with its black leather strap, square silver face, and bright blue backlight—tight to his chest as Inari ranted, raved, and generally insulted everything about the Demon's Bane 2000 he could possibly think of.

When he was through, face pink and sweaty, Koenma just glared at him and said, in a very, very dramatic whisper: "Leave now, you ignorant naysayer!"

And that's exactly what Inari did, because he was too impatient to wait for the big reveal like a good minor character should. Hopefully none of you will make the same mistake?

Anyway:

Hiei didn't know what a wristwatch was (they were only just beginning to come into fashion in Demon World and he had never been one to follow trends) but he knew, given Inari's outburst, that they were nothing to be afraid of. He relaxed in Omura's hold, smirking, and when the door slammed shut behind Inari he said: "A wristwatch, Koenma? Is that really the best you could do?"

Koenma's red face went purple. "The base design might have been a wristwatch," he ground out from between clenched teeth, "but it does much more than just tell time, I assure you, so would you quit sneering?"

Hiei did not quit sneering. If anything, his sneer became a mocking grin.

"I suppose I'll just have to wipe that grin off your face with a little demonstration, then," Koenma said primly. He looked to the SDF-er with the green hair. "Moir, if you'd please lower Hiei's wrist for me?"

"Can't reach it yourself, infant?" Hiei said at the same time Moir said "My pleasure," and Moir was not gentle when he grabbed Hiei's neck and yanked him toward the ground. Hiei's knees collided with the floor as Omura used her hair to keep him pinned; Moir reached down, grabbed Hiei's elbow, and jerked his arm into the air. With his other hand he pushed back the sleeve of Hiei's cloak, exposing bare skin and a clenched hand.

Koenma—in a flash of speed Hiei had not been expecting—darted forward and smacked the back of the watch's metal body against the back of Hiei's exposed wrist.

The Demon's Bane 2000 very quickly showed its worth when the leather straps, seemingly of their own accord, wrapped around Hiei's wrist and fastened themselves tight with a click and a tug. The watch-face flashed bright blue, pulsing in time to Hiei's heartbeats (though only Hiei knew that that was the case), and then the blue light flashed and turned to deep, scintillating red tipped with black, blue, and violet, an outward manifestation of the colors of Hiei's soul (though only Koenma knew that that was the case). The color shifted back to bright blue, then, and much to Hiei's horror the blue light began to spread from the watch's face in a slow moving wave, inching down his hand and fingertips even as it started to travel up his arm.

Despite not knowing what the light would do to him, Hiei was not about to go down without a fight. He sent out ferocious bursts of his energy, trying to push the light back as best he could, but the light was a hungry thing that merely attached to the energy tendrils and clung to them, and this only made the light spread faster until it coated every inch of Hiei's skin and hair and eyes and—well, you get the point. To Koenma, Omura, and Moir, it looked like someone had dipped Hiei in phosphorescent paint.

To Hiei, of course, the reality was a starker thing. He could feel the light tracking over him, slowing, agonizingly changing him from the inside out, polluting and mixing with and melding everything that made him, him with the blue invasion, and when his body became completely coated in the light it started to recede with the same aching slowness. The light, mixed as it was with his power, grabbed at his demonic energy and pulled it out of Hiei's chest as it itself pulled away, reeling in toward the watch on his wrist, leaving him feeling exposed and cold and disconnected in its wake and he hated it, dammit, he hated it!

The worst part, though, was that he could still feel his stolen power even after it was stripped away. It buzzed angrily inside the watch, demanding to be freed, but no matter how hard he tried he could not absorb it again, and all attempts to access his power failed.

Reaching inside himself to feel his familiar well-spring of power was impossible. A small portion of his power remained within reach inside his body, but accessing the rest of it in the watch was like grabbing at a brick wall: all he got out of his attempts were metaphorical sore fingers.

"Good, very good," Koenma murmured. He had walked back to his desk while the light spread over Hiei and was staring at a small screen built into the desktop. On it were graphs and charts and fluctuating read-outs. "The Demon's Bane 2000 has successfully absorbed 80% of Hiei's energy reserves."

Omura looked up at Koenma in shock. "You mean that little thing—"

"Has the ability to drain most of a demon's energy and lock it away indefinitely," Koenma finished. His smiled was relieved, as if he hadn't been sure the device would work (which, in truth, he hadn't been since it was still in experimental phases). "On a stronger demon, the DB2000 would probably break under the pressure long before it reached 80% absorption, but for a demon of Hiei's level it is more than adequate to reduce his power to that of an exceptionally gifted, psychic human being."

"So that's what you meant when you said he'd be living as a human," Moir said.

But Koenma only grinned. "You'll see!" he said, and to Omura he added: "Let go of him and enjoy the show. It's only halfway over!"

She did as told. Hiei, however, did not stand up when freed, and when the light faded from him completely he made no move to rise. Finally, however, he raised his head, opened his eyes, and said in a remarkably calm voice: "What did you do to me?"

The lights, when everyone saw Hiei's face, seemed like little more than parlor trickery in comparison to their secondary effects.

Before, Hiei's hair had been blue-black, the tips of which caught the light and made it shimmer with indigo richer than any dye. There had been white streaks at the front, too, that marked Hiei as something other, dangerous, and different.

Now, however, the blue and white were gone, replaced with flat, matte black no more exotic or rich than the hair of your average Japanese person.

Before, Hiei's eyes had been unearthly scarlet, thickly lashed, and wide to the point of seeming childish. They'd snapped with power and emotion you'd have to be a master to truly read, and the color screamed at you, impossible to ignore and even more impossible to forget.

Now, however, Hiei's eyes were russet brown, and the only red in them came when light struck in exactly the right, rare way. They still flashed, they still boiled, but…

Russet was no scarlet.

"What," he repeated, "did you do to me?", and he ripped off the bandana on his forehead. Smooth, unblemished skin felt cool beneath his fingertips.

Koenma smiled smugly. "I only made you more palatable to human tastes, Hiei," he said. "For the next six months, you have been sentenced to spending time in Human World in order for you to learn about the humans there, and to learn to respect them." He leveled a finger at the fire demon, whose russet eyes had widened past the point of possibility. "Good behavior will result in a chance of a chance of parole, one that will take the form of working alongside my Spirit Detective until we see that you have been reformed into a nonviolent, cooperative demon we can count on in times of crisis."

"You can't do this," Hiei breathed, anger so barely controlled that he was trembling from the effort of not ringing Koenma's neck. Hiei, waste valuable time among humans, only to go on to work with the one who had bested him? It was unthinkable!

"I believe I just did," Koenma quipped. His smile looked less satisfied after that. "I understand you don't want to do this, but I believe it's for the best. You really don't have a choice in the matter, anyway."

"I'll kill them all if you make me live in Human World," Hiei breathed in that same, murderous voice, and Koenma's eyes widened.

"That reminds me!" he said, clasping his hands in resolution, and then he punched a button on his desk's screen. The words DEFENSE ACTIVATED flashed before him in bright red. "Try saying that again!"

Hiei's face contorted into a mask of fury. "I said I'll kill—"

BZZT—!

Hiei growled, grabbed his head in both hands, and convulsed as bright sparks of electricity burst out of the watch, coursed over his skin, and speared into his temples. Pain rocketed around inside his skull, ricocheting around until his mind felt as sharp as tortured jelly.

"Any thoughts of inflicting harm on a human," Koenma dryly remarked, "will be sensed and punished by the DB2000, level of shock directly proportional to intensity of thought."

Hiei looked up, glaring harder than he'd ever glared before, as the sparks disappeared. The intense, stinging pain faded as well, none lingering in his skull despite how much it had hurt.

I would have been able to shrug that pain off if I wasn't wearing this damn watch! he thought. Damn Koenma, I'll kill him if—

Shocks made him cradle his head in his hands once more, but he did not give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him groan.

"Thoughts of harming me or Spirit World personnel are punishable as well," Koenma said. He smiled like a cherub. "And I suppose I should mention that any attempts to remove the Demon's Bane 2000 will result in a shock powerful enough to kill you outright. Any questions?"

Just one, it seemed. "Can I at least kill demons?" Hiei snarled. He would need some sort of outlet for his aggression if he were to spend six—he could hardly believe he was admitting it to himself—six entire months living amongst infuriating vermin.

Koenma giggled. "Of course you can! I wouldn't leave you totally defenseless." He pointed at the watch. "There is a sensor built into the DB2000 that senses demonic energy. If a demon gets within fifty meters of your person, your power will be returned until the energy disappears. Once the demon is dead or vanished, your power will be drained again."

Well, that was something, at least. Hiei appeared a little less crazed after that, though he felt no less hatred for the toddler.

"Now, Hiei," Koenma said, "I assume you don't know how to read?"

"No," was the curt response. Why would Hiei need something like reading in Demon World, anyway? Strength was the law there, and the sharpness of your sword the only creed.

"Well, then," Koenma said, and he pushed another button. The DB2000's screen, the one of Hiei's wrist, lit up with bright blue. "You'll need it for school."

"School?" Hiei said, alarmed at the out-of-place notion, and then his mind became awash in letters, symbols, codes—he clutched at his head again as information beamed directly into his brain, and when the flood diminished and he glared down at the thing on his wrist, he was able to recognize the characters ringing its face as… numbers.

"Also," Koenma informed him, "pressing the face once and speaking the phrase 'Information,' and then a word you want to know about, will tell you things about the Human World you might not have already known." He seemed eager. "Would you like to practice?"

"No," came Hiei's instant reply, and Koenma's face fell.

"Oh." He paused, wracking his brains for something else to say, but this time Hiei lead the conversation.

"What did you mean, school?" he demanded.

"Well, what better way to learn about humans than to study alongside them?" Koenma said innocently. Inside, he was rubbing his hands together and twirling an imaginary mustache. "I have made arrangements for you at a human boarding school, where you will live for the next six months as a human student. You'll travel there tomorrow, and don't try to run away during the trip." He shook a mocking finger in Hiei's direction. "The Devil's Bane 2000 is a state-of-the-art tracking device as well as an information resource, energy suppressor, and communication device. Resisting my demands is absolutely futile."

Hiei inclined his now one-colored head and glared through russet eyes. He did not, however, say anything or mouth a snappy retort, because he was intelligent. Wasting energy this early in Koenma's game would not be worth the results, and he knew that well enough to keep his mouth shut and just accept everything… for the time being.

Koenma looked to Omura and Moir. "Take Hiei back to his cell," he ordered, and Moir hauled Hiei to his feet by the arm. To Hiei, Koenma said: "Human clothes will be brought to you tomorrow. And remember, Hiei, that cooperation will make things go much more smoothly than you think. Do as I've asked, and you will be able to be free in as little time as a year. Do you understand how generous I'm being to you, a convicted murderer and thief?"

Hiei shook Moir off and stared at Koenma, face blank as he thought it all over.

"I understand," he said at last, face still schooled into a careful neutral, and he turned and walked out of the room on his own.

But inside, beyond the blank face and apparent hopelessness of the situation, he was planning.

And when Hiei plans, you can bet he plans things well.

NOTES:

INFO-DUMP CHAPTER, AHOY!

Remember the Spirit Detective Gadgets Yusuke got in the beginning of the series? Yeah, the DB2000 is one of those, Graphospasm-style. HUZZAH!

Remember, I need your help on this fic, guys! I want to deal with the worst of the high-school-fic clichés and stereotypes, so any suggestions you have for Hiei's fellow students, teachers, situations, and other such shenanigans, are greatly appreciated! Credit will be given if I use one of your ideas, naturally, so yay for getting involved? XD

AND MY LOVELY REVIEWERS! I've written you all little mini-replies because I can't remember who I replied to already, because I'm REALLY DUMB. You'll come to learn that soon enough. ^^

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