Okay, just so y'all know, Kiyoshi really scared me in the last chapter. And I'm the one who made him that way (what does that say, you think?). Of course, part of that could be the fact that I see it in a certain way and am trying to convey it to you… so it might not be as scary for you as it is for me, because I might not have made it totally clear… but whatever… Anyway… I only own Kiyoshi, Takeshi, Kasumi, and Akiko. 'Cause Mizuko is dead. And sorry about the 'bonus chapter.' I really was bored. I know this chapter is a bit shorter than the last ones have been, but that might be a good thing.

Okay, I got a review after the last real chapter asking if Kiyoshi was evil. I wanted to make him seem a bit evil, but he isn't, not really, as this chapter should demonstrate. It's more that every single person, no matter how kind, has a bit of evil in their hearts. Kiyoshi flipped when Mizuko hurt one of his friends, and his anger combined with that kind of power made him seem a bit evil. Another thing was that he didn't want to have to kill her, so by mocking her he was protecting himself. Finally, he has great but not complete control over his tremendous power. So his rage took hold of him, and he lost control of it to an extent. That's not to say he didn't know what he was doing; he did. It's just once he started, he was mad enough that he wasn't able to stop.

I apologize for the 'bonus (or bogus, if you like) chapters.' I was really bored. That shouldn't happen again. At least I didn't post them on separate days, and posted this at the same time as those two right? And this chapter is dedicated to Bhel-Elryss, for the review that made me explain something important to the story (in other words, the paragraph just above this one.) And now that I've written half a page of author's notes, you can read the story.

Akiko, Kasumi, and Takeshi watched uneasily as Kiyoshi snapped his fingers. The plants on the floor that had surrounded Mizuko withered and died, and they breathed slightly easier. However, the one Kiyoshi was carrying with him remained intact. As did the look in his eyes.

And, although none of them allowed it to show, they were all slightly afraid. This boy had just painfully killed a class A demon without so much as blinking. And despite her obvious agony he had spent the last moments of her life making fun of her. And, on top of all that, the only damage he had sustained had been at what amounted to be his own hand.

But what frightened them most was not that he had killed her, or even the way he had killed her. All of them had accepted that, in this job, it was kill or be killed. What frightened them was the look in his eyes. It wasn't regret or sadness. It wasn't disgust at taking life. It wasn't even a happiness that they had defeated an enemy, ridding the universe of what the other three considered to be an evil. Even happiness would have been better than what had been in his eyes.

A cold indifference. Kiyoshi's eyes had said he simply didn't care. They said that it made no difference to him one way or the other. They said that it really didn't matter to him whether Mizuko lived or died. But he had killed her anyway, simply because that was the easier option.

And that look had not left his eyes.

Strangely, it was Akiko it frightened most, although her fear showed the least. But, unlike Kasumi and Takeshi, she had seen that look before. Mostly it had been in the eyes of people who were insane. The rest of the time, it was in demons who had been around for far too long, who had seen to much death and destruction to really care anymore. But never before had she seen it in a human. And never before had she seen it in the eyes of a fifteen year old boy.

As he approached them, he saw them eyeing the plant warily, "Don't worry. It is completely loyal to me. And it recognizes your auras. It understands that the only circumstance in which it is to harm you at all is if you are trying to kill me. Which I trust you won't try to do." His voice wasn't as it had been, uncaring and cruel, but his eyes remained devoid of the light that usually filled them, despite his reassurance.

The purplish plant had receded from covering both arms, his neck, and his torso to remain wrapped around just his muscular left arm. But as he was left-handed, this didn't help his team's nerves any, as avoiding it on his left hand would be more difficult than if it was on his right. Finally Kasumi asked the obvious question, "Can't you set that thing off to the side, or something? It's really freaking me out."

The sound of his friend's voice seemed to break the spell that still held Kiyoshi. A look of bemusement crossed his face, before he said, "I can't. Not without killing it."

"You can't?"

"No. None of you noticed, but when I made it grow, it moved its roots into one of the cuts along my wrist. After a few moments the wound, although it was one of the deeper ones, healed." He held out his wrist to the others. And there was a single point where the vine flowed smoothly in under his skin, like an iv, unnoticeable until it was pointed out.

"Oh my god."

Kiyoshi then pulled a bottle out of his bag and, without asking, poured some of its pale yellow contents into Akiko's shoulder wound. She winced, unprepared for the sting. He then said, "That should counteract the venom, although I can do nothing for the punctures themselves." Akiko nodded before ripping the sleeves of her shirt into strips for a makeshift bandage.

Kiyoshi then turned his attention to Takeshi. Takeshi, however, wasn't having any of it. "You idiot! Don't take care of me! You're in worse shape than I am right now."

Kiyoshi looked at Takeshi for a moment. Quietly, he said, "Am I?"

And for the first time since the fight, the others looked past the plant on his arm and actually saw Kiyoshi. His clothes were torn and stained with his blood. There was dried blood on his face and arms. But when they looked closer, there wasn't so much as a single scratch on him. Confusion passed into their eyes and he answered it, "One, both, or a combination of the plants' genetic material contains coding for something that causes amazing healing." Holding up his left arm, he continued, "This plant lives in my veins now, feeding off the nutrients in my blood as well as my aura. If my guess is accurate, it will in return heal me without any kind of effort on my part. Although I'd imagine a powerful poultice or salve of some sort could be created from it. This plant is incredible; two extremes living together with perfect symbiosis and harmony."

Takeshi looked at the other boy a moment before nodding, after which Kiyoshi applied an ointment to his cuts. It appeared that Takeshi's inability to summon aura had come from a state of shock, not actual, physical damage. And since Kasumi had taken no damage, they left the room, Kasumi supporting Akiko. They stumbled up a flight of stairs and collapsed, two on a bed, two on couches, in a room directly above the place where Mizuko's body still lay on the cold stone floor.

Almost without his knowledge, the ivy living on Kiyoshi grew, creeping across the floor and up the door frame, tendrils hanging down to protect the group as they slept.

Koenma was still a bit worried, although now it was more because he didn't know where his team was than it was the fact he thought they were in any danger.

Botan seemed calm as well. In fact, she seemed even calmer than he felt, which didn't happen often.

"1987… 1988… 1989… 1990…"

Then quietly, and with a sigh of relief, he tucked the last report away into the filing cabinets. "1991."

The next morning Kasumi woke early, and looked around the room. She and Akiko had collapsed on the massive bed, Takeshi and Kiyoshi each sleeping on a couch.

Akiko was still asleep, recovering from her wounds. It shocked Kasumi how vulnerable she appeared to be.

At some point in the night, Takeshi had fallen off the couch without waking up. He lay on the floor, asleep and snoring. He looked like the child he was.

But when she looked at the couch nearest the door, Kiyoshi wasn't there. Instead, she noticed the door was slightly open. Glancing back at Takeshi and Akiko, she left quietly as well.

There wasn't so much as a whisper of sound in the entire house, but for Kasumi's footsteps. Checking the rooms, she eventually found Kiyoshi, sitting in a window seat and staring out at rolling hills, which were drowning in purple and just beginning to be touched by the morning's first light. From the angle she was at, Kasumi couldn't see the plant that seemed to have become Kiyoshi's pet.

Thinking he hadn't noticed her, Kasumi began to back out of the room, to leave him alone. But Kiyoshi said, without ever looking away from the window, "Don't tell Akiko or Takeshi."

Startled, Kasumi froze. She then walked across the room and sat down next to Kiyoshi, "Tell them what?"

"That you saw me like this."

"Like what?"

"Like… Like…" He ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated that he couldn't find the right words. Then he turned to look at Kasumi, and she understood. His eyes were no longer dead; instead they were tortured. She almost wished they were as unexpressive as they had been the day before. Pain filled them, leaving room enough only for fright and the most profound hatred Kasumi had ever seen. Quickly, his eyes dropped and he held his hands in front of them. "It's just that… even though there is no physical mark, her blood is on my hands. I can feel it. I can see it. And I can't get her screaming out of my head."

"You didn't have a choice, Kiyoshi. You just did what you had to do. It was kill or be killed."

"There is no justification for murder."

Kasumi put her arm around his shoulders, reminding her of how she always kept her younger brother from crying. But her brother was only six. The boy she was hugging now was only a year younger than she was. And he was both taller and stronger than her. But it still somehow felt the same. And she realized that, somewhere along the way, that's how she had begun to see both Kiyoshi and Takeshi. Younger brothers who, while they may someday surpass her or, in Kiyoshi's case, now that he already had, she still needed to protect.

After a moment, she felt Kiyoshi relax. She hadn't said anything, because she knew his words were true, and it wouldn't help him any to try and make them seem false. Killing was immoral, no matter the person. "Thanks, Kasumi." He said.

"No problem. Is there a reason I'm not supposed to tell the others?"

"I didn't want any of you to see me like this. You and Akiko could handle it. But Takeshi… Takeshi is young. Too young for this job. Really, all of us are. But, even though I'm only a year older, I'm still a lot older than him, somehow. The same goes for you and Akiko; Akiko is the oldest, but she's only five years older than him. But all three of us are much older… Much more mature in some way Takeshi wouldn't understand. I don't know how to explain it. But I know he looks up to all of us; he wouldn't be able to handle seeing the pain I feel at killing someone who was trying to kill me. And if we let him see that…" Kiyoshi breathed in deeply, trying to figure out what he was trying to say. "If we let him see that, I fear it would come back to him at the worst moments and end up getting him killed. I don't think it was right of Koenma to hire him. But all the same, we need to protect him."

Kasumi understood exactly what he was saying, and began to realize that Kiyoshi didn't need her protection at all. If anything, it was the other way around. He was much stronger than her; not just in terms of physical strength, and aura, but in mental and emotional ways as well. He had hidden that much pain from them, just to protect someone else. She didn't think she could have done it, but she agreed with him. Thinking, she realized something else. Akiko's life had been hard, but only because she had always challenged herself. As for herself and Takeshi, they had had relatively easy lives. Sure, she had always been expected to train. But that wasn't the same as a difficult, painful life. She knew nothing of Kiyoshi's life before Koenma had hired him. But she somehow felt that it had been filled with turmoil and hardship from an early age. A kind of pain that she would never have wished upon anyone.

Kasumi stood. "I think I'll go explore."

"If you're hungry, the kitchen is down the stairs, down the hall, second door on the left. All of the food is safe." She looked at him quizzically and he added, "I woke up because of the screaming, and couldn't go back to sleep."

She nodded before leaving Kiyoshi alone in the room, silhouetted against a window that framed fields of deadly grass.

The group didn't know it, but Mizuko's servants had fled the house.

And now rumors of a group of four—two males, two females; one demon, three human—were spreading quickly. Because the servants knew Mizuko had been killed; not how or by which one of them, but that one of the humans had killed her. They knew that one of the humans had enough aura to overshadow that of an A-class demon.

And those rumors quickly reached Kurama.

"Amazing. They're still coming after us." Kurama muttered after a demon told him of the group. "But their ordeal will now be even more difficult. They now have legions of lesser demons after them, intent on making a name for themselves. And the stronger demons they meet will be much more wary than Mizuko was."

They had reached the place Kurama wanted to wait for Koenma's new team. Despite the dust that told of the centuries since the place had last been inhabited, the place where Kurama was now pacing was well-worn. A track, a rut, cut into the ground, lower than the rest of the floor, showing Kurama had often though exactly as he was doing now, treading back and forth in the process.

"What I don't understand," Hiei said suddenly, "Is why you can't think and sit still at the same time. And why you even need to think about it at all; all we need to do is wait and see if they show up. Either they will, or they won't, and there's not really anything you can do about it at this point anyway, short of finding them and personally leading them here."

Kurama stopped, looked down at the track he was in, and nodded.